Abbey Estillore

Essay 2:  Whose Voice Is Dominant In Colonial-Postcolonial Texts?

When we talk about the novel in colonial-postcolonial studies, we assume the narrative to be the experience of someone who is colonized.  The voice that speaks in the colonial-postcolonial text is imperative to understanding that person’s story—this person has authority to speak about the lived experience because the colonized identity authenticates him or her.  The course’s required readings, however, include perspectives from the colonized and the colonizer.  The “amount” or “frequency” of the uttered/inscribed perspectives from the colonized and colonizer prefigures the dilemmas in identity formation.  In essence, we must ask, “Whose voice is dominant in colonial-postcolonial texts?”  To attempt to answer this question, we need to consider the true voices of the narrators, characters, and, perhaps, the author as well as the voices that they gain from the novel.  This requires looking at Bakhtin’s theories of the novel along with colonial-postcolonial matters. 

The following texts exemplify narrative structure while complicated by colonial-postcolonial themes on identity: Train to Pakistan, Jasmine, Things Fall Apart, and Heart of Darkness.  Nevertheless, read in conjunction with each other, Train to Pakistan and Jasmine, and Things Fall Apart and Heart of Darkness allow for the “conscious debates between authors or exchanges arranged by later readers,” as Objective One states.  In each of these novels, readers are encouraged to put their trust in the narrators to get at the “(un)truth.”  When reading the Colonized’s perspective, readers must exercise caution in attributing a victim mentality toward him or her even though he or she has undergone or has been a product of colonization.  (Post) colonized peoples face identity crisis and the act of finding a voice (so much as defending one) certainly perpetuates the notion of victimization.  In order to validate themselves, they utilize the novel as a means of self-expression and assertion of identity and history. 

In Things Fall Apart, Achebe demonstrates dual perspectives on Africa, beginning with the pre-colonial, and concluding with the postcolonial viewpoints.  Readers receive Okonkwo’s tale in Part I and the missionaries’ tale in Part II.  Placed in juxtaposition, these tales provide competing discourse on whose voice is or voices are dominant in the text.  Neither view should privilege one over the other; however, Part II devalues pre-colonial Africa in Part I.  Part II “interrupts” the usual order of things, traditions and cultures, and reserves to “correct” views presented in Part I.  The importance of having these dueling perspectives is to allow dialog that persists in being undermined, challenged, and destabilized; this exchange dispels universals on ideas such as “Colonizers = Villains” or “Colonized = Victims,” so that the “=” sign turns into a “-“ sign to signify discourse, intertextuality, “no final meaning to anything you’re reading, but continuing conversation of texts and readers” (Dr. White’s notes on Intertexuality).   

 An “objective” narrator takes readers into India and Pakistan in Singh’s Train To Pakistan.  To provide a deeper study of the political events surrounding and what led up to the Partition, Singh provides human dimensions that demonstrate its historical significance, atrocities, and credibility.  The notion of morality—good versus bad—differs from one character to another in this text.  By creating characters with unique viewpoints about morality, Singh depicts the need for a dialog to interact between humans.  No one view is accepted as the truth; rather, conflicts and diversity of beliefs, thoughts, opinions are examined within the political and historical events that caused the horror, tragedy, and violence of the Partition.  It appears to me that this “objective” narrator takes each character’s view and re-inscribes it as closely and as accurately to the original perspective of this character.  The “objective” narrator can be compared to a mediating figure:  one who receives both sides of an argument, records the original, and has characters to converse with each other.  Morality issues are subjective, and are, thus, the result of the characters’ decisions and thinking patterns in the novel.      

The complexity of the narrative structure in Conrad’s Heart Of Darkness immerses readers into a world of barbarity and civilization.  Structured as a frame narrative (a story within a story), this novella is in itself symbolic—the passage of time within the story of the outside story parallels the overall story as the unnamed narrator follows Marlowe throughout his journey into the Congo.  The unnamed narrator retains flexibility in what parts of the story he chooses to address or omit; or decides its significance to the narration.  The voice that speaks in this frame narrative is hard to tell.  Without the voices within the frame narrative, the unnamed narrator’s tale loses credibility or authenticity.  Having these voices helps to author the unnamed narrator because he has evidence of the dialogs.  Readers gain “inside” knowledge about what the unnamed narrator knows about Marlowe’s tale.  To some extent, this unnamed narrator appears hesitant to tell Marlowe’s tale in his words.  Marlowe’s tale serves as documentation for the unnamed narrator to develop intertextuality for the reader—the phrase “heart of darkness,” as Marlowe and Kurtz attribute to Africa, is a preconditioned idea about the duality of human nature.  Light and dark imagery mirrors good and evil, juxtaposes savage and civilized, models Self and Other, depicts voice and voiceless that afflict humanity and reveal man’s potential for duplicity.  Whose authority is exercised in the narration?  The unnamed narrator, Marlowe, and other characters are involved in a complex web of conversation with each other.  It consists of a back and forth exchange of ideas that does not seem to reach a resolution for, in doing so, it resists the flow of multiple meanings.   

Reading colonial-postcolonial literature may shed light on the idea that colonizers lost the land of the colonized, but gained the colonized people.  In Things Fall Apart, the missionaries came to colonized Okonkwo’s people and land and, once driven out, grabbed the most valuable resource of the land, which was cheap manual labor.  A similar event took place in Heart Of Darkness when Kurtz established his “empire” in the Congo.  The natives comprised the Other and were forced into cheap labor.  Readers learn about the voice of the Other through the colonizers, which are subject to their own lens of what civilization entails, of what is right and superior and correct in their vision.  The voice of the natives is re-inscribed to imitate, to mimic the colonizers’.  As readers, we are introduced to racist and derogatory information that develop into stereotypes and slurs.            

With the insistence of the voice in colonial-postcolonial texts, where does a feminine voice in similar texts fit?  In Mukherjee’s Jasmine, the heroine is subjected to a very fractured view of female identity as a transnational migrant, woman of color, and exoticized spectacle.  The notion of having a voice has become a trope of power and identity for marginalized, voiceless groups—especially women of color.  Jasmine has to assert her voice by adapting to the dominant culture, at least some aspects of the culture, so that she can blend in with living in America as a widow and transnational migrant.  The narrative structure of the novel can be described as a cyclical pattern with a tendency to involve the personal.  As a transnational female migrant, Jasmine faces constraints put upon by patriarchal society.  Not only does she has to negotiate illegal status in America, but she also deal with being seen as an exotic/erotic object.  The “charm of the unfamiliar” becomes her “ticket” to being accepted by America as she gets involved in platonic and romantic relationships.  Asserting feminine voice is not simply a matter of having power to have a say in the matter.  It has more to do with being a woman that presents a threat to patriarchy, resisting her signification as man’s Other.  In the novel, voices of other characters regard Jasmine according to the personas she takes on:  Jyoti, Jasmine, Kali, Jazzy, Jase, Jane.  Each renaming seems to refract Jasmine’s voice as her identity simultaneously moves away from a colonial past and into an immigrant future.  With each renaming, the voice that speaks in the text is not just Jasmine’s but the mixing of the fragmented personas gleaned from her interaction with the characters.  

Although poetry enables one’s assertion of identity and history, the novel accomplishes this goal while it presents differing voices to interact in a dialogic exchange.  Inherent in this relationships are representations (re)created due in part to competing identities when perspectives of the Colonized and Colonizer are juxtaposed (sometimes, superimposed) that continue an ongoing discussion.  As tensions, conflicts, and dialog develop in the novel, the voice that is heard or unheard gives insights into figuring out the colonial-postcolonial identity.  The person authorized to narrate the postcolonial experience brings into the forefront the question of representation.  The Postcolonial Studies at Emory website introduces the “interrogation of the whole question of representation.”  Bearing this in mind, the representational power of the novel enables the authorial, personal, and communal voices to be in dialog with each other.  In the novel, some combination of these voices attempts to assert one’s identity, history, and language toward understanding oppression, stereotypes, prejudices.

In conclusion, Bakhtin’s theories on the novel is a study that I would like to pursue.  The workings of the narrative and dialog result in a (re)telling of a tale that which creates/fractures representations, identities, languages.  The question of representation pervades in colonial-postcolonial literature as well as other literary schools of thought because there will always be another point of view being, waiting to be, or not at all addressed.  Whose voice is dominant in these texts cannot be attributed to the narrator, character, or author alone.  Instead, issues of authorship and origin, language, and genre in colonial-postcolonial studies are in constant dialog that delve into how relationships among nation, colony, countries, cultures, traditions.  No single voice defines who really speaks in the novel because of its heteroglossic nature.  Competing discourse destabilizes universals and allows multiple meanings and interpretations.  It promotes awareness, sensitivity to one’s culture, and connections.  As Karen Daniels points out, “…colonial and post-colonial literature bring value to the table, in part because it is easier to realize this in terms of a story rather than, for example, listening to someone lecture on it.”