Mallory Rogers

There’s Three Sides to Every Story

In high school, I can only remember ever studying old canon English literature.  But regardless, I knew then that I was a strong reader and that getting lost in a good character’s life was something I thoroughly enjoyed. Therefore, I decided very early in my college career that I was going to study literature as there’s something about learning about cultures and living vicariously through the characters that keeps me interested.  Through college literature courses, I’ve learned that I’m most interested in books where I am given the opportunity to learn about cultures beyond the boundaries of the Western world. 

When I scanned the class schedule for this semester and saw the course title, Colonial and Post-Colonial Literature, it’s no wonder I was instantly attracted to it.  With a vast experience with English literature in general already under my belt, and having previously taken minority, immigrant and American literature studies courses, I assumed that I was familiar enough with the terms colonial and post-colonial to know what to expect: western text with ideals I was likely familiar with and non-Western texts with new perspectives and points of views that I likely wasn’t. I got what I expected—old Western ideals matched with unfamiliar responses. Only the responses were not only from old white elite men like I was used to reading about. Rather they were from those who experienced the West taking coming into homelands and overpowering not only their people but also their land. Because I was unfamiliar with the historical happenings  of the novels, this is what I saw as new territory for me as a reader—territory I was eager to explore.

As I stated in my mid-term, I knew from previous Literary Theory studies that for the sake of creating colonial literature, the Western culture fit and placed people who weren’t from the West into relations according to where the authors thought they were, and not for the purpose of trying to understand them. They made the “other” by defining themselves. As a result, this, to me, only created un-realistic figures and did little in terms of helping disseminate the actual history of colonized cultures. By including historical events, such as the initiation of the partition in India though, the clear and constant clash of the “good” and “bad” cultures made me really sympathize with the colonized--something I had done during my experience with minority literature. 

During the first week of class, while reading Robinson Crusoe, I found that I was right—I was encountering old Western ideals of essentially, European equals good and non-European equaled bad. However, during the second week of class, I found myself quickly thrust into a new and unfamiliar genre that was very different from immigrant or minority literature-- a new genre, if you will, where you hear both sides of the same story from two very different viewpoints—dominant and oppressed. This time the “others” were defining the stronger culture, and thus exposing its faults through colonization terms.

Reading the opposing texts was then further enhanced by using intertextuality. Hearing the story of settlers and those settled back to back for the first time was intriguing, and this strategy provided us as readers with interesting dialogue from the get-go.  Dialogues where we, as readers, were given the chance to hear both sides of the story, and render a verdict of who did what right and who got it wrong.  This gave the dominating class a way to express their viewpoint, while it also provided the oppressed with a chance to have a voice a retort to those who conquered them. For instance, Jasmine, a woman living in a traditional patriarchal society, was given the opportunity to tell her story of losing her husband and coming to America to find a new way of life. She was able to challenge tradition as a result of colonization, and she was able to transform her identity. As readers, this is enlightening, as we aren’t being told by authors what we should and shouldn’t think of Jasmine. Instead, for the first time, we determine on our own our version of the truth—the third side to the story.

By learning about native cultures and ways of life, we see how lives are changed through the process of colonization and how the others are essentially forced to become more like the Westerners. Works such as Things Fall Apart showed us how the African settlements remained true to their traditions such as deep roots in relation to families, yet the characters also incorporated features from the dominant culture, such as religion.  

 As a result of the conquering by one culture, than the oppressed blending the dominant and oppressed cultures’ beliefs to form a new way of life, postcolonial text creates a new canon of literature for us to explore. Literature that, for the first time in my studies, allowsr me to consciously recognize the transition and the development of a new type of character: multicultural characters. These characters, such as Jasmine for instance, weren’t immigrants or minorities. Instead, as I explored in my mid-term, the characters were hybrids, with a dual persona of: 1) the after-the-fact postcolonial characters introduced with an imposed history of being native and the classifications it entails; and 2) working to expose the denunciation she encounters for her status from the dominating class.

Postcolonial authors such as Derek Walcott, who I completed my second research posting on, create hybrid characters like those of Jasmine to keep their historical and cultural traditions alive and to educate readers of the acceptance of newly introduced and very different ways. For authors like Walcott, whose works promote a multicultural society where we are all open to learning from one another, postcolonial characters should remain open to assimilate and use what worked from the colonization process to his advantage, like Iqbal in Train to Pakistan, who studies English to “be [respected and] educated.” Instead of creating a large hostility to change, authors like Walcott produce model characters, like Iqbal, who are subjective and believe in differences. We see the assimilation process—what works, and what doesn’t. 

Like myself, many high school students find themselves learning about standard colonial texts, such as Huckleberry Finn and Robinson Crusoe. I think it’s interesting that we as a nation promote the ideal that everyone is equal yet we continue to teach our youth only colonial texts,  when postcolonial literature affords educators with the means to introduce hybrid characters that operate on principals of diversity, tolerance and inclusion, or multiculturalism.

 In America, everyone’s supposed to have a voice. I believe that the most important outcome of a literary education is to read and understand the diverse voices, and to experience the voice of those in dramatic circumstances and desperate situations so that we can help others to “open their minds” to the possibility of new learning opportunities. Therefore, when I teach literature, instead of providing different cultures with “turns” by semester, I look forward to incorporating an array of genres, including colonial and postcolonial works, as a means to allow the different groups of texts and students to experience dialogue –many for the first time-- between themselves and others.