Weldon Mercer

December 11, 2009

Colonial and Postcolonial: Identity and Other

       My research on the last four novels led me to the concepts of identity and the other which helped my understanding on how the novel is perhaps a large part of modernity.  It seems that the topic of identity and the other interested me the most.  The four novels “Train to Pakistan,” “Jasmine,” “Things Fall Apart,” and “Heart of Darkness” express the identity and other concepts and are important in understanding the culture in both  differences of race and how these differences conflict with each other. Naturally, there are differences of race, religion, and education, but the main difference is dominance of one over the other and the concept of identity is formed.    

       Consequently, an effort to create an identity for the recently colonized people leads to changes. An identity is a crucial element of the colonized as to who they really are in the narratives and is exemplified in both Train to Pakistan and Jasmine.  Within both these novels, the effects of being colonized saturate the culture and influence the actions of the heroes.  While some of the formerly colonized choose to embrace this hybridization of the cultures, some rebel against the influence and bridle against any further influence from "the other".  Now that the narratives are told from the perspective of the colonized, the self-other dynamics are switched and we're left with a narrative that is intent on self-discovery while trying to find their bearings between their old world of traditions and the new world of European influence.

       The first Colonial novel that I researched is “The Train to Pakistan.”  In the novel, the British distance themselves from the Indian people because they are a different race than them.  The British, in the novel, seem to believe that the Indian people are not as civilized as them because their culture is different, but the fact remains only that they are a different race then them.  One example of this is at the bridge party when Mrs. Turton is trying to speak to them in Urdu.  She realizes that she does not know very much of their language so she tries to get someone to translate.  She is surprised when one of the Indian ladies says, “Perhaps we speak yours a little” (Forester 42).  Mrs. Turton did not think that the Indian women would know her language.  Instead of embracing this cultural similarity she makes fun of them in a racial way.  She says, “They pass Paris on the way, no doubt,” said Mrs. Turton, as if she were describing the movements of migratory birds.  Her manner had grown more distant since she had discovered that some of the group were Westernized, and might apply her own standards to her.” Instead of being happy that the conversation would be easier to talk with the Indian women, Mrs. Turton seems to be on the defensive worried that they might expect her to treat them like Westerners instead of the “other.” That did not have anything in common with her.  Basically she is unhappy and does not want to be on the same social level as the Indian women.

       In Train to Pakistan, it ends up with  many different religions that are unsatisfied, oppressed, fighting for their independence, and in a chaotic and disordered state. Normally, it is the newly independent nations which struggle with the crisis of identity.   By having two seemingly opposite characters as the heroes of Train to Pakistan, Singh allows us to see how the British rule had affected the Indians in different ways.  Iqbal is the scapegoat of the novel with the town untrusting of his strange ways.  With Iqbal as someone who embraced the changes, he is ostracized from his own community and is actually turned into "the other" by his own people.  It also shows the prejudiced feelings a country can have toward its own people, ones they consider better than themselves because of the education they received in a foreign country. Iqbal ran into the same prejudice feelings on his return from England."  The British rule is over, but the effects of being colonized are not gone and without the British to serve the role as "the other", their representatives are substituted into this role.     

 In similar fashion, Jasmine’s identity is never the same as past and future come together to create a whole but constant changing person. Each stop along her journey reshapes her persona, and each transforming culture she leaves behind is changed. In “Jasmine,” Mukherjee uses her characters as vectors that employ the push and pull of identity form. Jasmine is a transnational migrant from India, her identity and others are influenced by too many changes in the fast lane of America: “I checked myself in the mirror, shocked at the transformation. I looked Jazzy in a T-shirt, tight cords, and running shoes. I couldn’t tell if with the Hasnapuri sidle I’d also abandoned my Hasnapuri modesty.” Jasmine has to take a little India and a little England with her baggage and share her change self in the new world.

In Things Fall Apart there is a struggle with problems of genealogy and cultural identity. Things Fall Apart is a cross-cultural misunderstanding and the consequences to the rest of humanity, when a belligerent culture or civilization, out of sheer arrogance and ethnocentrism, takes it upon itself to invade another culture, another civilization. One of the things pointed out is that Umofia had no kings or chiefs but had a highly democratic and efficient government. The courts used the white man's justice: either a flogging or hanging: both senselessly brutal in Umofian eyes. The main reason for the culture clash is lack of social interaction and understanding between the cultures. And the misunderstanding did not end at the end of the novel; the colonizers are the ones who recorded the history, so, as the saying goes, "…Until the lions produce their own historian, the story of the hunt will glorify only the hunter.  African history is unique; "History has not treated the whole world the same way, and we would be foolish not to realize how we are in a peculiar situation as Africans” (Achebe). The result has, at best, a hybrid spirit, a postcolonial-postmodernist identity.

In Heart of Darkness, the statements; “The horror!  Exterminate all the brutes" refers  to the dark other side of Kurtz identity. A number of themes are prevalent. However, two themes always preside at the surface of this work's murky Congo waters: the innate darkness of humans and the terrible lengths humans will go to pursue financial wealth. One way that the reader becomes more intimately aware of what this "darkness" is and how it is portrayed as an ugly element of human nature is through Kurtz, the mighty ivory magnate himself.

       Upon Marlow's making the reader aware of the intense human suffering as experienced by the Africans, he finds out, and relays to the reader, that Kurtz is indeed at the helm of these tyrannical and ghastly operations: "The thing was to know what he belonged to, how many powers of darkness claimed him for their own... He had taken a high seat amongst the devils of the land--I mean literally," Marlow speaks of Kurtz. Indeed, it is one thing to speak of humans possessing dark powers. It is entirely something else, though, when suggesting that human darkness is innate in people's hearts. In fact, there comes a time when Marlow even refers to Kurtz as "a gifted creature."

       In Heart of Darkness, one grasps the concept that people can possess some most terrible traits. Some people live to oppress others, and others live to earn extreme wealth. What this work helps to understand is that human darkness is something that resides in all of us.

       In reference to Obj. 2a: "How may literary fiction instruct or deepen students’ knowledge of world history and international relations compared to history, political science, anthropology, etc.?" Evaluate fiction's usefulness for learning about the colonial-postcolonial dynamic and other issues in world cultural history.

My answer is that postcolonialism reflects on a culture’s  identity:  gender, race, racism and ethnicity with the challenges of developing a post-colonial national identity. In addition, how a colonized people's knowledge was used against them in service of the colonizer’s interests, and of how knowledge about the world is generated under specific relations between the powerful and the powerless, circulated repetitively and finally legitimated in service to certain imperial interests. At the same time, postcolonial theory encourages thought about the colonizer’s creative resistance to the colonizer and how that resistance complicates and gives texture to European imperial colonial projects, which utilized a range of strategies, including anti-conquest narratives, to legitimize their dominance.

Works Cited

Achebe, Chinua.  1959. Things Fall Apart. Anchor.  Books Random House. New York.

Conrad, Joseph. 1995. Heart of Darkness. Wordsworth Editions Limited. 8b East           Street, Ware, Hertfordshire SG12 9HJ.

Mukherjee, Bharati. 1989. Jasmine. Grove Press. New York.

Singh, Khushwant. 1956. Train to Pakistan. Grove Press. New York.