Nicole Wheatley

Postcolonial authors define multicultural subjectivity 

Lucy     

Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy is transparent except for its voice, which has soul. As Richard Eder in The Los Angeles Times states, “Lucy is transparent, like one of those models of the human body where everything is visible; bones, muscles, veins, lymph and digestive systems, and the organs. Everything except the soul, of course. But in “Lucy,” transparency is the soul. That, and anger” (Los Angeles Times, 3). Kincaid, an author that uses transcendental feelings in her books as a voice to reach out to the reader  so they can feel what Kincaid feels’ They can relate to the person the story is about, and it affects them, as the reader. It is a brilliant way of utilizing her voice. Kincaid’s writing style has brought her much recognition in her career. In Lucy, the anger of the 19-year old, who comes to New York City from Antigua to work as an au pair, is an instrument in discovery, not destruction. In Kincaid’s voice, or dialogue, we see Lucy as being delicate, in pain, and longing for something different, a change. This is the very energy that propels her journey between her home and New York, her childhood and adulthood, and the hunger she has for love and autonomy. Kincaid uses the medium Lucy to tell her story, her autobiography, in a vivid, true, necessary non-fiction novel. Kincaid’s voice, Lucy’s voice is harsh and graceful explaining to the reader what it is like to be a postcolonial example, a “third world” sensibility in the United States, a child battling with her past and becoming a woman battling her identity. Mariah, the young wife and mother, romantic environmentalist in Lucy comes to New York to be an au pair to wants Lucy to love and admire the life she takes pleasure in. Lucy is a child of hide-and-consider. Her island was colonized, her ancestors slaves, and she is an au pair. Kincaid reminds the reader that Lucy is very much aware of whom she is, “But I am not cargo, I was not a man, I was a young woman from the fringes of the world, and when I left home I had wrapped around my shoulders the mantel of a servant” (Kincaid, 31).

Jasmine              

Bharati Mukherjee’s Jasmine is the story of a young Indian woman’s move from her birthplace to the United States. The heroine of Jasmine stood out in popular fiction as a one-woman figure for the South Asian Diaspora, and the novel’s thematic focus on Jasmine’s shifting sense of herself offered the text up to the literary critical preoccupation with politics that dominated the 1990s. Several times in the novel Mukherjee uses her voice through Jasmine to explain the experience of rural Indian women who suffer from Western prejudices and do not understand the lives of women in North American by contrast. She uses Jasmine’s voice as often being resilient, adaptable; but I do not find her to be adaptable, more malleable. She is adaptable in the sense she managed to survive, but the men in her life seemed to shape her identity more than she did. Thus, reverting back to Mukherjee’s voice, she informs the reader the men alone create her identities: Jasmine, Jase and Jane. Jane of course, being the western creation of Jasmine, is the most self-assured, self-possessed of all her created identities... Jasmine states, “Prakash for Jasmine, Taylor for Jase, Bud for Jane. Half-face for Kali” (Mukherjee, 161). Kali is the only name on the list which the narrator gives herself. Mukherjee’s voice Kali has a “rapist” for a husband speaks loud and clear to the reader explaining the deception and deceit Indian women face in the western world.

Heart of Darkness/Things Fall Apart        

Joseph Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness, has been considered for most of this century as a literary classic, and a powerful voice against the evils of imperialism. Conrad uses the narrator to reflect the savage repressions carried out in the Congo by the Belgians in one of the largest acts of genocide committed up to that time.  There are critics who believe Conrad’s piece reflects racism. Chinua Achebe pointed out that the story can be read as a racist or colonialist parable in which Africans are depicted as immutably irrational and violent, and in which Africa is reduced to a metaphor for that which white Europeans fear within themselves. The title Achebe, argues that Africa is the “heart of darkness” where whites who “go native” risk releasing the “savage” within themselves. I feel Conrad gave a description of the genocide on the Congo to the best of his ability and used his voice as a colonizer, and that is how it was seen through their eyes. In the end as Conrad writes, “he seemed to take me into partnership in his exalted trust. After all, I was also part of the great cause of these high and just proceedings. Instead of going up, I turned and descended to the left….For a moment I stood appalled, as though by a warning. Finally I descended the hill, obliquely; towards the trees I had seen” (Conrad, 256). Conrad’s voice is that of a colonizer of his time, men who did not agree with the motivations of the genocide, but would not, if it was an option, continue to be a participant in it.

               These authors use their voices to tell horrific, historic, tales in a fictional setting, but as the reader interprets these stories or texts all of them suddenly become very real.  It is almost as if you are there. You can feel what these people suffered, their triumphs, their failures, their goals, their dreams, their longings, their youthfulness, their hopes and their survival. It is like watching a movie from beginning to end without the characters acting out the parts, but the voice, of the book, being the storyteller. It is the lose concept of “influence” which in literary genre is considered to be author-centered and evaluative, of which all four authors, meet the category. Thus, because of its excessive emphasis on authorship, the concept of influence gave way to intertexuality. All four books, deepen students’ knowledge of world history and international relations in political, economical, social and the world by utilizing the author’s, Kincaid, Mukherjee, Conrad, and Achebe, voice as the information needed to be more worldly as a student.

Intertextuality  

The shift of influence to intertextuality does not totally bracket off the author-centered criticism; rather, it aims at broadening it to take into account the multifarious relations that can exist among authors. As a writer Achebe saw his primary role as that of a teacher instructing the ignorant about the bewildering amalgam of African cultures. Also, his initial texts were partly aimed at correcting some Eurocentric jaundiced stereotypes about Africa and Africans. For instance, Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is full of passages highlighting complex series of evasions, open-eyed blindness, willful forgetfulness, lacunae, egoisms, and the like, against Africa and her people (Niyi, Osundare, 1993:11). Although African life is not directly presented in the novel, Africa, as the setting of the novel emerges as the negation of rationality. Heart of Darkness, therefore, shows a typical European attitude to Africa, typically in the ninetieth and early twentieth centuries. To place African writers in the right context, the representations of European attitudes to Africa must be kept in perspective. We can therefore look at Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, which is a revisionary reading on Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, and pay attention to the gaps, omissions, silences and absences perceivable in the colonial texts. Things Fall Apart, gives the reader a different perception of Africa and Africans from that given by Conrad. The indigenous values, mores, cultures and norms are not abnormal; rather it is organized to present a society that is bathed in its own culture and history. Therefore, there is an intertextual link between Heart of Darkness and Things Fall Apart in which they dual between social and racial outrage and dialogue.

               Jasmine, adopts a heterogeneous, collage-like form, cramming her novel with references to texts and forms that effortlessly range across time and space: shipping records, museums, diaries and letters. This is a form of intertextuality called “textual hybridization” which enables Mukherjee to rewrite and reconstruct lives and histories, to recreate spaces across time and geography, particularly emphasis upon the formative influence of South Asian culture upon America identity and western civilization. She notes caution throughout the text, noticing that power dynamics continue to plague intercultural interactions with one another. All of these works demonstrate the relevance of the theory of intertextuality to the evaluation of their cultures. The basic issues relating to the theory have been discussed – its origin, goals, culture and perceptions. Therefore, I will conclude that, intertextuality appears informative and very relevant to these works utilizing the authors voices as the zigzag, back and forth approach of telling their stories and reaching the reader.

Conclusion        

In conclusion, it is very important for a book to have an impact on its reader, to have a VOICE. This is not just apparent in these few texts, after taking many Literature courses I have realized it is apparent in most texts; so the reader is getting the complete message. I have come across this just recently in my Los Angeles Literature class with Dr. Kevin McNamara, when I discovered Joan Didion and Mike Davis; both authors tell true events  in a fictional pretense using the method “new journalism.” So intertextuality is still relevant to readers and authors alike, but is practiced in many different formats.

Works Cited

Eder, Robert. “Jamaica Kincaid’s uses her own voice in Lucy”. Los Angeles Times, June:1994, pp. 3& 10.

Osundare, Niyi. African Literature and the Crisis of Post-Structuralist Theorising. 1993: Ibadan: Options book.