Ryan Smith

December 7, 2011 

Something Like Humanism

            Our course on colonial and postcolonial (i.e. world) literature has contained several well-known academic classics—Heart of Darkness, for example, is often studied with its style, thematic material, and (pre)modern insights at the foreground, leaving the cultural context in the background. But the inclusion of non-canonical texts has served to break down standard academic interpretations, in favor of a web of intertextuality that connects first the paired works, then the course work as a whole. Intertextuality encourages texts to be read together, in the spirit of rebounding, mirrored or reinterpreted ideas and images that move between and through various works. Historicism, which identifies the cultural or historical context of a work as giving that work its birth and ultimate meaning, is closely related, and serves to reinforce one of the most important themes of the course: that history (in our case colonial/postcolonial) not only serves as a backdrop for our novels, but informs them, gives them value and allows them to “speak” to each other, through shared connections.

            These associations lead in a number of directions, but they seem to share a (noble) trait that is common among many great writers, an insistence on the human being. This may appear to be a given—isn’t most literature directly about people?—but what I mean is that our texts, in particular, put great emphasis on the human aspect of history, politics and, as is too often the case, violence and suffering. Divorced from people, topical concerns blend into inevitable, almost-otherworldly events that lack importance and inspire little pity—the same goes for books—but our authors are able to take concerns that are relatively removed from standard American life, and, by breathing life into the characters and their stories, make human experience inescapable and beautiful. Examining the second half of the course’s novels, we see how these texts not only contrast each other in intertexual webs, but work together to say something about human beings and their closely related history.

Beginning with Khushwant Singh’s Train to Pakistan, death and pain make themselves immediately and unavoidably known. The first several pages of the book include an ever rising death toll which serves to shock unfamiliar readers into the harsh reality of the situation. As the novel progressed, I was particularly struck by my own ignorance (and most of the class’ for that matter) of the history being related here, and of this level of suffering. This many people died? There was this much political and social turmoil? There are possible negative aspects related to the entity known as Gandhi? The struggles of the characters in the book became personal for me—as I believe they were intended to. So, turning the course objectives, I realized that for all our apparently high multicultural finesse, there are simply massive gaps of information many students do not typically possess. American ignorance reared its head, and I was left wondering about a plethora of interrelated issues that might be the cause of this, fairly egregious, oversight: failure of education system perhaps, propaganda maybe, misinformation even, probably laziness. But I was always drawn back from these musings to take part in the human drama so explicitly linked to (recent) history.

            Dealing with Train to Pakistan’s sister-text was just as complex. In Bharati Mukherjee’s Jasmine, again we encounter bloodshed and violence—mostly in the past, but still present and terrible in Jasmine’s life in India, and again I am distressed by ignorance of such injustices. In particular, Jasmine, as a transnational migrant, brings such issues literally closer to home. And while it may be an ominous sign that it sometimes takes physical/national proximity to foster sympathy, Jasmine’s undeniable American-ness simply seems to makes her that much more demanding of our attention. Mukherjee, by emphasizing the human over raw statistical data, has created a character and situation in which the reader is implicated. For example, while watching a report on an immigration bust in which “illegals” (like Jasmine herself) are treated inhumanely, Jasmine’s occasional ironic anger is aroused. It stops being possible to look at these people as numbers, and the situation as political football. We’re drawn, because of the reality (fictional existence aside) of Jasmine, to the reality of individual lives in issues that seem too big, general or far-removed.

            Chinua Achebe’s novel, Things Fall Apart, continues this literary phenomenon. By placing the reader extensively in the jungles and villages so typically generalized and/or degraded by European imperialism, Achebe effectively allows us to connect with the people there—even if we are somewhat put off by his anti-hero Okonkwo. As in the other novels discussed, political and emotional distance is difficult once the reader is made to sympathize with or understand a character. Standard glorification of Christian missionaries, for example, doesn’t hold up particularly well when one is witness to the degradation and destruction of the ancient ways of life at the end of the novel. Supporting the novel, the Aljazeera video clip on the rape of the Congo works (again) to humanize the African victims that are often non-entities in studies of European colonial history and politics. Achebe, in the context of an African writer, works to give voice to those he sees as voiceless—a major problem he has with our next and last text.

            Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad’s short novel, was written before Things Fall Apart, but takes place chronologically after. It is easily the most well-known and most frequently taught work discussed here, and it is also (perhaps not surprisingly) the most ambiguous. While it is clear that the text’s narrator, Marlow, is to some degree racist, it’s less obvious if the work in question or the author himself are inherently so. Achebe, in his controversial article—and here is an especially blunt case of intertextuality and literary dialogue—points out that Conrad fails to give any Africans in the novel a voice beyond those of animals or a dignity worthy of a human being. And while the article is convincing, it glosses over the possibility, even likeliness, that Heart of Darkness, with all its injustices, is actually critical of the racist systems that Achebe is attacking. A quick comparison to the first book of the course, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, shows the difference between Crusoe’s general acceptance and participation in colonial motives and Marlow’s existential musings about power, chaos and darkness at the heart of colonial pillaging. Even if Achebe is right, however, the novel still contains a powerful examination of he minds of the colonialists themselves, which may reveal as much about the horrors of the enterprise as other perspectives.

            Let me describe a small, personal-but-course-based revelation. Our books, as I’ve been saying, intimately connect human beings with the context of history and politics. We’ve learned, throughout the course, that these connections are both a sort of dialogue between colonial/postcolonial texts and histories, as well as a narrative that actually creates history. Dialogue becomes politics—at its most optimistic—in the sense that two or more differing perspectives communicate through common means and shared interests. In the same spirit, narrative becomes history itself, as a series of stories told about humankind. Our texts function as both, presenting multiple perspectives and political possibilities, constructing and finding their place in the very history that they come out of, and ultimately blurring the lines between “history, political science, anthropology, economics, etc.”