Mallory Rogers

10-01-2011

The Path to the Emergence of a ‘New and Improved’ Native

Theories of literature are put into place to tell us how society works—the unwritten rules of the game of life. This course provides Westerners with the opportunity to see the differences between the East and the West first-hand through literature, as we navigate through colonial and post-colonial novels simultaneously. When colonial literature emerged, it gave the West something to define itself against for the first time.

The post-colonial literature that came about as a response to the colonial literature helps us as Westerners understand and grasp the meanings behind the accepted ways of the authoritative western world. It allows us, the readers, to get a better understanding of the effects colonization and colonial literature had on those unlike the conquering Westerners (Objective 1).

My first encounter with post-colonial discourse came about through studies in Literary Theory. Here, I learned of Edward Said’s theory of orientalist discourse where he says that orientalist literature, or the ‘other’s’  literature, is what constitutes and ultimately makes up the differences between Eastern and Western cultures. Commonly, orientalist discourse focuses on understood philosophies and includes well-known and accepted wisdoms that are ultimately tailored for European - or more simply put, American - use. By the West emerging in post-colonial texts as a relentless and authoritative power figure, the interpretative community reading colonial texts are given the Westerner's point of view about the ‘others,’ or anyone different than European, as if it were social fact. The ‘other’s’ literature, the post-colonial literature, is generally accepted as both historically and materially defined, according to Said, and includes infinite genres. However, the most influenced literature of this theory that aligns with Said’s beliefs includes novels focusing on social descriptions and political accounts of subaltern native characters.

The Western civilization is not known as the founding author of orientalism as a theory per say; however, we are the inheritors of it.  For the sake of creating colonial literature, the Western culture fit and placed people into relations according to where the authors thought they were, and not for the purpose of trying to understand them. Differences between Easterners (the colonized) and Westerners (the colonizers) were made very apparent through the emergence of colonial literature and the exceptionalities of the post-colonial native did not exist until it they were written (Objective 3).

Through the first colonial author, Daniel Defoe, the appearance of the elite European settler class was clear and the concept of the native, or rather the other, and what they looked like was initiated.  Said would say that Defoe, as the creator of the first European novel, introduced the world to the idea of the native. He created the character Friday who he portrayed as childish, unchristian and “my savage”—in other words, very un-European (Defoe 161). On top of this, Friday’s physical characteristics distinguished him as even further different that of his European “master.” Instead of pale, fair skin like Robinson, Friday had yellow-colored skin; different clothes that needed replacing by “linen drawers”; he wasn’t Christian; and he even had “long and black” hair (Defoe 162-164).

Like we see in Robinson Crusoe, a large part of the colonialism literature also focuses on the natives’ role in terms of being part of the “lesser” subservient race. We see in the story that Friday falls to Robinson’s feet after he saves him, and Robinson immediately visualizes Friday bowing down to him as his slave—this being the ‘natural’ subservient role for any native. Attempts to make natives appear to become like Europeans were hindered. While Defoe toys with the idea of giving the native elite characteristics, by having Crusoe teach him English, the author ensures the two settlers would never be able to be viewed by the reader as equals, as Friday’s character would always have “broken English” and poor enunciation because he lacked a tongue (Defoe 175). As the clear distinctions of the differences between master and servant were made, Friday's emergence as the first description of a native could easily be seen by Westerners specifically as a placeholder if you will, or a stand-in for anyone unlike that of Defoe’s  colonial European protagonist.

Supplemental colonial texts support the use of distinct differences between the Eastern and Western cultures and the “us versus them” ideal generally accepted by the West.  In The Man Who Would Be King, the differences between the settlers and the natives are reinforced, as natives are referred to as having to travel by “intermediate class, which [was] very awful indeed…drinking roadside water”  versus “First class… where intermediates (natives) weren’t allowed to patronize in the [exclusive] refreshment rooms” (Kipling 2). Through this piece, colonizers were noted as not having been “softened by appeals in the memory of their mothers” as this was a native trait, and even the Elite priests were shown having “servants [in the form of subaltern or rather colonized persons] behind him” (Kipling 6).  Clothes compressed the native’s issues, as we also saw in Robinson Crusoe, when Dravot forces the men to strip their clothes off and change into “outrageous things to make [them] look like heathen[s]” (Kipling 8). Kipling goes on to describe the elite, presumably European men in contrast to the natives, and additional ways to distinguish them in regard to being natives, by stating that the settlers are in comparison “fair—fairer than you or me with yellow hair and remarkable well builds” (Kipling 8). The idea of the colonizers’ look being very different from that of the native is then reaffirmed again in Lucy, when the “Visitor” describes the American family she works for as “six yellow-haired heads…bunched as if they were a bouquet of flowers tied together by an unseen string” (Kinkaid 12).

In addition to the stark differences between the settlers’ and the natives’ physical appearances noted in The Man Who Would Be King and Lucy, another predominant theme seen in both colonial and post-colonial works we’ve read includes boundaries and restrictions placed on natives in regard to accessible resources. As we saw in Lucy, the young woman travels to America to work for a family while she attends school with the ultimate hope of acquiring a quality, European-approved education—the best of the best. The schools in America enjoyed more prestige than those from Lucy’s island back home, where everyone studies to become a nurse. In America, the schools were regarded as better and earned more prestige as well as more options for the future.  Because of this ideal, and the fact that the dominating society made up of Western European’s maintained their authoritative stance throughout colonial and post-colonial literature, the colonizers were able to maintain their dominance over the colonials—a concept more conventionally known as Hegemony. In A Small Place, this idea is put in simple terms: natives were “ruled by the English, thus [they] also had [to live by and accept] their [ways]” (Kinkaid 93). Hegemony, however, is not an interpellation, where the consensus remains constrained to the select, or the ones invited to the table, rather it is manufactured by a small fraction of society and it works to maintain and reproduce the accepted social order. The reproduction of this dominating theme allowed the West to remain more successful than their colonial counterparts.

With that said, the attempted assimilation of the native characters into the dominant European culture through Western education ideals and Christianity--for instance, in the case of Friday--causes the natives to consequently form a dual-personality, which is the basis of hybridity. Through the handed-down teachings of European fairytales, such as the daffodil fields, European ways became known reality not only for the colonial society, but also for the post-colonial society as well. However, we quickly realize that European “fairytales” and ways of Western-dominated life in general, pushed onto natives don’t come without their resentments of the idolized European life. A prime example of this is when we saw Lucy’s thinks of the daffodil field poem, “I wandered Lonely as a Cloud” by William Wordsworth when Mariah takes her to the field, she’s angry and claims to hate the flowers. She couldn’t understand why Mariah loved them at all. Mariah “insisted that I be the servant and she the master…and the master business did not become her at all” (Kincaid 143). Lucy’s response to the resentment she felt for the daffodils, as well as Mariah, allowed her to form her own next steps: “if the guide gives [you] advice [you] don’t like, then change the guide.”

With it’s hard to deny that natives such as Lucy yearn for at least some sort of approval by European standards (e.g. American education), they eventually seek out their own, new identity as they break away from their previous lives and resent their current situations. The double consciousness required to occupy both social spheres –native and post-colonial  settler– had to be quite a difficult task for even the brightest of the natives. Thus, the natives did what they needed to change—by breaking free from their previous lives completely and disconnecting themselves from the land of the other in an attempt the natives reform themselves into a new breed. Lucy went through this transformation literally as she found herself motherless in America, as well as disconnected from her “motherland,” while the protagonist in A Small Place accomplished the separation by “leaving a place they had to leave but could never forget” (Kinkaid 92). Through these two situations, we see the post-colonial native characters struggle to accept their decisions to assimilate into the European world as they struggle with not being able to fully leave their past behind.

To account for this change in character, post-colonial authors set out to change the way they were given by colonial authors. However, the only way for post-colonial authors to challenge the colonial ideals published and accepted by colonizers, was to set out to tarnish the meaning behind the European ideals of natives.

By attacking European’s accepted ways of life, post-colonial authors such as Jamaica Kinkaid provide us with insights into non-European ways of life. Through Kinkaid’s Lucy and A Small Place, Kinkaid is able to dehumanize and shame Europeans very much through.  Lucy says, “I realized that the origin of my presence on the island—my ancestral history—was the result of a foul deed; but that was not what made me” (Kinkaid 135). She also notices that “[Mariah, on the other hand was given] too much of everything, [and] all of them, mother, father and four [European] children looked healthy and robust; but I [knew] I was looking at ruins” (Kinkaid 88). Lucy says, “Mariah spoke harshly to me, and she began to make up rules that she insisted I follow” (Kinkaid 143). This dehumanization of the “master figure” aligns very much in the same way with the ways in which colonial authors denounced and shamed natives in colonial literature (objective 2). By allowing her characters to break away from the colonizer’s given elite identity and see the effects, post-colonial literature permits its authors to allow characters the opportunity to shed their previous known skins and form a new set of characteristics and a new overall identity. An identity unlike the dehumanized traditional native and likewise, one very different than the dehumanized, yet privileged elite.

This new emergence of a dual persona – with an imposed history of being native and the classifications it entails, along with the denunciations of the dominating class – allowed natives to form a new class: one of hybridity. Hybrids at the emergency of post-colonial literature were a new trans-cultural form that was produced as a direct result of colonization. Hybrid natives were shaped by both their by their own unique cultural, and by the effects of the history that came out of colonial power. With hybridity, natives are able expose the dominating empire’s “real” truths—the reality of the differences, rather than the truths the empire of colonizers imposed on them. The natives ultimate triumph over colonialism through the emergence of the hybrid native proves ultimately that the native’s reached a success of differentiating themselves from the said identity that was given to them and the elite. This success was reached and duly noted through the emergence of post-colonial literature such as A Small Place and Lucy.

Said studied orientalism to determine his personal opinions in relation to how orientalist opinions unconsciously shaped his own thoughts and ideals. I believe that Said would say orientalist discourse is not necessarily inaccurate because some of it is based on history, but Said argues in his 1978 book, Orientalism, a good point about accuracy when he says, “…ask how one can study other cultures and people from a libertarian perspective” (2009).  Because of Said’s theory, and the fact that we are reading colonial texts alongside post-colonial texts, it makes me question almost everything I read about the East. I often find myself thinking about how someone from the West, such as myself, can make assumptions about the East that are completely correct and accurate, without a full understanding of the ways of the word in the East. I think this awareness that the Western way is not always the “right” way is a basis for the rationale of reading post-colonial and colonial texts simultaneously. Like Murphy’s Law states, for every actions there is a reaction. We see this through the two genres of literature. We see the changes in ideals taking place as a result of colonial texts, but on the other hand we also see the effects of colonial literature on natives especially through the post-colonial texts. This line of questioning I’ve encountered as a result of the readings thus far, have piqued an interest that I’m sure I will add to as we continue to explore the world of colonial and post-colonial texts.