Chrisoula Mouliatis

08 December 2009

Self, Other, and Everyone Else

            Throughout the course’s progression, I could not help but think back to Edward Said’s critical text Orientalism. Everything I thought I knew about Asia and Africa was shallow and insignificant in comparison to the knowledge enabled me through literature. What both Said’s Orientalism and the texts of colonial-postcolonial literature have in common is the theme of self versus other. Here, we are the self, and literature about Asia and Africa concerns the others. There are also divisions within the text that depict the theme even further. I’d like to discuss the significance of intertextuality and how our devised reading of these texts helped to clarify the theme of self and other within the course and within the texts themselves. We read four very different novels and various outside texts, but I found Things Fall Apart, Senghor’s poem “Prayer for Peace”, the news article by LaFraniere “Wife-Beatings in Africa”, and Train to Pakistan to be representative of the self versus other theme in more ways than one.

            While reading Things Fall Apart, I developed mixed feelings for Okonkwo. His intentions were to keep the culture and tradition of the Igbo tribe intact so that he and his family would not have to submit to the missionaries. On the one hand, if he is perceived as the tragic hero, then he is accurately portrayed as a man who wants to maintain order in his society so that a strong bond remains amongst the people. On the other hand, he fails in the “hero” part of the term because his quest for ultimate power leaves the rest of his family in doubt. The struggle depicted in the father/son relationship becomes the ruin of Okonkwo’s fate. Because he is so disapproving of his father’s actions or lack thereof, his need to be respected and feared becomes even more important to him. When he realizes his son does not adopt the same aggressive characteristics, he loses him also. Okonkwo is the self, and all those around him are his little minions, or others. It is the divide Okonkwo creates within his own family and tribe that causes his ruin. The feminine traits he admonishes so often might have saved him if he yielded to their presence. These traits survived in his mother, father, son, wife, daughter and nearly everything else around him, but he chose to be blind to their existence. Instead of including them into his life and heeding their advice, he pushes them away and sets himself apart. His way is the only way, and he scoffs and anything different.

            To further analyze Okonkwo’s behavior in what was supposed to be 19^th century Africa, I looked to the 2005 article “Wife-Beatings in Africa”. Both texts represent a common motif: violence towards and the oppression of women. LaFraniere’s article tells the story of a woman, Isimeto-Osibuamhe, who left behind the man abusing her to take a stance for herself and to make a point about African men and their aggressive demands of obedience. Unlike Isimeto-Osibuamhe, two of Okonkwo’s wives remain under his control and do nothing to assert autonomy. Okonkwo does, however, get reprimanded by the earth goddess for beating his wife during peace week, which, typical to Okonkwo’s nature, goes ignored. For us, domestic violence is a huge no-no and any male that enacts this type of violence gets blacklisted until the day he dies. To see this occurring over a hundred years ago is not surprising, but after reading that domestic violence still happens even as recent as five years ago is simply shocking. Not to mention, it is accepted as the norm in African society. Okonkwo met his fate in the end as he felt the pressure of keeping his native tribe intact and eventually crumbled under the weight of violence, oppression, and power of his own hand.

What struck me as curious when weaving the two texts together was my inability to take a stance on the efforts of colonization for Africa. How can I sit here and contend that colonialism causes unnecessary struggle to a race of people who can live life according to their own standards when violence between men and women still exists? It exists without many outlets for refuge. It exists with the shared impression that women are still at fault for their own misery. Maybe Achebe wasn’t adhering to his true African identity when writing Things Fall Apart because he led Okonkwo to his death as a result of his mistreatment to everyone around him. Values of equality and independence are upheld (most of the time) by the West which should make me feel good about where I come from, but somehow this fact does not make things any better.

Moving on to Train to Pakistan, my reading experience was not met without difficulty. Many elements of the story related to the theme of self and other mostly because we were presented with a wide array of characters who struggled with identity. I felt ignorant not knowing of this occurrence in history previous to reading the novel. Iqbal and Jugga are two contrasting characters whose contradicting viewpoints articulate much of Said’s discourse in Orientalism. Iqbal is representative of the West, Jugga of the East. To us, Iqbal still represents the East because it is where he and his ancestors call home. Without Jugga, though, readers would obtain a highly distorted view of the East because Iqbal shuns identity altogether. While Iqbal isolates himself from the chaos the society endures, Jugga immerses himself in it. Iqbal characterizes what we see in Objective 1 as a transnational migrant because of his education and ability to camouflage himself to whatever situation he encounters. Both men take into consideration the impending arrival of the train and how it will forever affect their lives and the lives of millions of people in their same situation.

We originally read “Prayer for Peace” intertextually with Things Fall Apart, but I’d like to incorporate it with Singh’s Train to Pakistan. Take away the couple mentions of “Africa” and the poem is essentially about a country torn apart by bloodshed and colonialism. At first, I thought the Christian imagery would not be appropriate to intertwine with the novel, but its relevance to the British Empire reverts back to the reason India was partitioned in the first place. With imagery of the Crucifixion, we have a similar image of Jugga sacrificing his own life so that Nooran can survive. When put into a bigger perspective, it seems that a struggling empire, religious divide, and hatred fueled the violence that lead to a massive number of lost lives. Although some patriarchy existed in Jugga and Nooran’s relationship, he redeems himself by proving that there is no divide between the two of them; they exist as one, both ignoring complications that religion and tradition tried to place on them. Unlike Achebe’s novel, Jugga’s death symbolizes the dissolution of self versus other whereas Okonkwo’s is the tragic result of its presence. Through the use of Objective 2b, we see that poetry like Senghor’s is relatable to more than just Africa. A “Prayer for Peace” gives hope to our world’s future even though history is not exactly encouraging. It serves as a powerful statement to coincide with Singh’s novel that history is not forgotten, the lost lives are not overlooked, and there is a culture “still breathing” out there.

Choosing four texts to analyze intertextually was difficult only because I did not know which works to utilize. I feel that the latter half of the course and the discourse on African and Asia was successfully represented by Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, Singh’s Train to Pakistan, Senghor’s “Prayer for Peace”, and LaFraniere’s article “Wife-Beatings in Africa”. There is self and other represented in the way we read the works themselves, and there also exists the theme of self and other within the actual text. Characters both represent and confound true identity. These complexities with identity and the meeting of many different cultures and personalities gave way to a successful, but heart-wrenching, ideal of where the standard for colonial-postcolonial literature should be. Through the use of objectives 1 and 2, I was able to explore novels intertextually with poetry and other outside texts which resulted in a better understanding of the “other” I was so ignorant of before. This course resulted in the dissolution of my own qualms with self and other in that, although my life is not nearly that interesting, I have found ways in which I can relate to the characters of the novel and history of our world.