Veronica Ramirez

Colonial Driven Migration

Before this course, when I thought of migrants, it used to bring up two general images to mind, one of nomadic tribes or of poor, displaced people migrating to a different country to realize their dreams. This semester I was able to expand my knowledge or at least conception of what a migrant could be. There are different ways and reasons for migrating, for example people moving into a land as colonizers with the purpose of monetary gain and political influence, as in Heart of Darkness and Things Fall Apart.   In Jasmine and Train to Pakistan, we see Jasmine and others migrating out of their home nation fleeing the colonizers or the restrictions of their own home land.

 While there are some obvious differences in the reasons for migration, the similarity is that all people are looking for a different life than the current life they lead. The methods that the migrants used to accomplish their goals are specific to the final outcome they expect, for example the colonizers use the self and other, to dehumanize the other, and take control.  The texts in the second half of the class have really brought out the importance and the reasons for the movement of people, and have provided different views that bring out the different voices of the people.  

Transnational migrants such as Jasmine, add a twist in that they are migrating out of their home, out of nations that were previously colonized. Jasmine’s view on her personal history and experience, shows how she able to migrated from her home in India, and continue her migration through the United States, because for her “experience must be forgotten, or else it will kill” (33).   Jasmine epitomizes the migrant characteristics of searching for a better land; she keeps growing, learning and instinctively moving towards a better and better life.  Jasmine uses a transformation mechanism in which she rejects most of her culture and renews herself, she explains it as, if “we murder who we were so we can rebirth ourselves in the images of dreams”(29). Jasmine shows that land and people have no possession over her, and she shows no sense or roots which relates to secondary Objective 6 in terms of “space and place”.  

The most obvious migration pattern in a Train to Pakistan is the forced migration of Muslim refugees to Pakistan. Train to Pakistan only focuses on the village and their reaction towards this migration, or more accurately their thoughts, and fears about the ordeal. In Train to Pakistan the migration due to political regulations by the former colonizing power does nothing but create upheaval in the village, cause murder and destroy love. The novel did not provided nearly as much historical or political information that the reader needs to understand the events, but the website material such as the Train to Pakistan reading guide filled in the historical information on the partition of India. 

There is an interesting example of intertextuality between Bharati Mukherjee’s Jasmine and Khushwant Singh’s Train to Pakistan. Both authors’ describe a migrant who leaves their nation, gets educated elsewhere and comes back to the homeland. In Train to Pakistan, it is Iqbal Singh, a social worker and political activist, and in Jasmine it is the man they called Vancouver Singh. Iqbal Singh sees his migration back home as a way to help the people, and to further his political views, but it also turns out to be a very selfish personal journey for fame.  Iqbal would not act since “there would be no one to see [his] supreme act of sacrifice” and what would it matter if   “a few subhuman species were going to slaughter some of their own kind” (169).

Jasmine saw “Vancouver Singh, in his “funny foreign yellow raincoat and boots, walk the raised paths [her] father had once walked” and “felt robbed... felt disconnected”. (63) Vancouver Singh “had gone to agricultural school in Canada... and was testing out scientific ideas” but even under good pretenses, buying land from Jasmine’s family after her father’s death, he is still a stranger to his own homeland and not helping his own people (62).  The foreign educated young men, with seemingly altruistic motives move back to their homeland but seem to have no real impact.  Vancouver Singh understandingly was a minor character, but Iqbal should have played a major role in Train to Pakistan, as they are both part of the movement of pushing their own countries toward modernity.

Previously, I would not have considered the Belgian colonizer migrants, but they are leaving their home, to make a life elsewhere, even if they are killing and enslaving the people as they go. This movement of people across nations for the purpose of colonization of land and peoples, such as in Heart of Darkness and Things Fall Apart, is presented from two points of view in our texts. In Heart of Darkness, we get a view of a colonizer migrating into a new land, from a semi impartial narrator, and we get a view of the horrors that the colonized were exposed to. In the tale of colonization, and this is especially visible in Heart of Darkness, there is definitely a sense of possession over land and people. Marlow explains how even though they have colonized the land, it is not to be owned, “The earth seemed unearthly. We are accustomed to look upon the shackled form of a conquered monster, but there- there you could look at a thing monstrous and free.”  The African culture is attached to their land, while the colonizers have no particular attachment, and according to Objective 6, this is another issue of traditional cultures and their attachment to their own space and place.

Just like women’s voices are generally mute in the Colonial texts we read in the course, Heart of Darkness excludes the African’s voice in the novella.  Achebe, with “Named for Victoria, Queen of England” and “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness,” is able to create a voice for the silenced Africans in Heart of Darkness.  Achebe in Things Fall Apart is able to provide a home space, with their views on the infiltration of colonizers into Africa.  Heart of Darkness creates a dark, mysterious and foreboding space when describing Africa. Achebe in “Named for Victoria, Queen of England” answers back by stating that for some the general feeling of Africa, as in Heart of Darkness, is “the spiritual void and mental stresses that Africans are supposed to have, or the evil forces and irrational passions prowling through Africa’s heart of darkness. We know the racist mystique behind a lot of that stuff and should merely point out those who prefer to see Africa in those lurid terms have not themselves demonstrated any clear superiority in sanity or more competence in coping with life” (190).  

In Things Fall Apart, the reader sees colonization from the view of the people being colonized and is able to understand their reaction to the colonizers, the reverse view presented in Heart of Darkness. At the beginning of Things Fall Apart, the colonizers are either hated or ignored, but by the end of the novel, there seems to be a break between the villagers in Umofia. Some natives like Okonkwo did not like the colonizers at all, and wanted to get rid of them forcefully while others admitted that “the white man had indeed brought a lunatic religion, but he had also built a trading store and for the first time palm-oil and kernel became things of great price, and much money flowed into Umofia”( 178). Okonkwo seems to be rebelling against Objective 5 in relation to modernity, because he understands how to live and thrive in his traditional world but not within the white man’s new world with a new religion, new government and new modes of trade. Okonkwo cannot let go of his traditional culture, is not able to change and adapt, like Jasmine, and is a victim of his own inability for change.

Some of the migrants in this course have kept their language and culture, an example would be the Indian migrants in New York that Jasmine encounters, or the European colonizers in Africa.  Then we also have migrants like Jasmine, who do not keep any “social and economic relations between their societies of origin and settlement” (Transnational Migration webpage). Whether you are a transnational migrant fleeing the colonization of your land or as native living between two worlds, the traditional and the new, you must adapt or fail.  Chinua Achebe in “Named for Victoria, Queen of England “ illustrates this crossroads and confusion between two languages and two cultures “but still the crossroads does have a certain dangerous potency; dangerous because  a man might perish there wrestling with multiple-headed spirits, but also he might be lucky and return to his people with the boon of a prophetic vision” ( 191).

Sources:

Achebe, Chinua. “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness”

Achebe, Chinua. “Name for Victoria, Queen of England.” The Post-Colonial Studies Reader. New York: Rutledge, 1995. Handout (Excerpt).

Achebe, Chinua. Things Fall Apart. New York: Anchor Books, 1994. Print. 

Buxton, Camille.  Final Exam 2009 “Culture Clashes and Literature”

Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. (Kindle and Dr. White’s online link only. No page numbers available)

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

Ramirez, Veronica. 2009 Midterm

Singh, Khushwant. Train to Pakistan. New York : Grove Press, 1981. Print.