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Sample Final Exam submissions 2013 (2013 final exam assignment) |
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Jacob A. McCleese
8 December 2013
Dregs Rising to the Surface
Canonical literature is aged like a fine wine; it
is sweet nectar for the logophile, and an uplifting depiction of the world from
years gone by. As I’ve progressed through this course, it has become apparent
that canonical literature, for all its beauty and fascination, fails to allow
all voices in a multifarious world to be heard. This happens often in cultured
circles. Wine enthusiasts do not want to the dregs. People who appreciate the
sweet bitterness that is coffee do not want to find coffee grinds in their cup.
However, the dregs make coffee and wine into the delectable drinks people love
and adore. Literature is the same way. Like all fine things, literature has its
enthusiasts who prefer to read what they find pleasurable, neglecting dissonant
voices of literary dregs. The literary dregs, however, bring life, vitality, and
flavor to all forms of literary expression. My main focus for most of this class
has been the dregs of feminine expression rising to the surface in post-colonial
literature (Obj. 4), and it continues to affect me in paradigm shifting ways.
My midterm mainly dealt with
the many ways in which feminine voice is repressed in
Robinson Crusoe.
This novel is a male-driven, male-focused, and
mostly phallocentric piece of masculine adventure. I made the point in my
midterm that Defoe unapologetically ignores female expression by having no
dynamic female characters, and never allowing his female characters to express
any depth of thought or personality. The classic fear of women is largely
responsible for this rejection of feminine voice in classic or colonial
literature. Male authors, during the colonial period, approached women like
foreign lands. Women were objects to be conquered not understood, invaded not
cherished. Feminine voice was a black area of human knowledge, which could only
be explored at the explorer’s own risk. Most colonial texts unilaterally
suppress feminine perspective, but post-colonial novels allow the female
perspective to burst to the surface of literary expression.
Mukherjee’s
Jasmine
is perhaps the most vicious display of feminine voice erupting to the surface of
literary relevance. This novel was my personal favorite of the course. Mukherjee
is not subtle in her opinion that women deserve to be heard in a male-dominated
society. In fact, many of her depictions of male-female interactions in the
novel suggest that women should occupy a dominant role in society by inverting
novelistic expectations. One fantastically disturbing instance of female
domination takes place immediately after Jasmine, the main character, is raped.
Rape has a long and enduring
history within literature and human civilization. Typically when a woman is
raped, this event destroys her sense of self-worth or value. Rape is viewed as
the ultimate expression of dominance over another person, usually a man over a
woman. However like so many novelistic expectations, even rape is inverted in
Jasmine’s
post-colonial discourse. After enduring her rape, Jasmine calmly prepares her
revenge. She narrates, “I put on my pants and wrapped myself for the iciness
outside […] the blade need not be long, only sharp, and my hand not strong, only
quick” (118). A slow, methodical appraisement of her situation gives an eerily
seductive quality to this scene. Jasmine does not appear broken or depressed,
and she is certainly void of fear. Her rapist has not taken her sense of
self-worth away. Jasmine proceeds to mount her rapist as he sleeps soundly on a
hotel bed.
Her mouth is spewing blood from her self-mutilated tongue.
Jasmine places the knife gently on her rapist’s throat and cuts him. She
finishes him off by stabbing him repeatedly as he falls to the ground. Other
than being a fascinating scene of literary violence, Mukherjee has just written
a scene explicating the post-colonial female dictum, defiance in the face of
adversity.
A major shift in power
occurred when female authors gained control of their own voices. Instead of
portraying female characters as sweet, innocent angels of the domestic space,
women surged to the surface of public life as forces to be reckoned with.
Jasmine
exhibits the ability of women to accept the inferior depictions of colonial
literature and use this inferior place as fuel to burn down towers of male
dominance. Female characters are more than just stock characters or vehicles of
Christian virtue and charity. Jasmine proves this by transforming into five
distinct women, emphasizing the depth of feminine personality and the
ever-changing development of the actualized feminine persona. Authors like
Mukherjee add female characters to the pool of literature that break the mold of
stereotypical female representations. However, this addition is not divisive. It
is an attempt to unify male and female representation in order to create a clear
mimesis of the world.
This mimesis must come from a place where feminine
voice is found valuable, because of how it has been ignored and mistreated in
the past. One might say that my critique of colonial literature is feminist. I
would not argue with this assertion. However feminist critique, a relativistic
one, is not concerned with female dominance, but an equal representation in
literature. Post-colonial literature has intensified my desire to see a
depolarization in “women’s” literature and “men’s” literature. Literature is
universal, it is a powerful force of unity that has been used to divide men and
women for a very long time, but through the continued creation and study of
post-colonial texts, the chasm can be mended.
Saying all of this sounds as if I am completely
demeaning the way colonial authors depicted women. That is not the case. The
classic representation of women has many positive qualities that post-colonial
authors do not ignore. These authors realize that women are the more nurturing
sex. They are the healing balm for all the abrasions that plague society’s body.
Derek Walcot, a poet I’ve come to admire during this course, writes “a mother
drawing the trembling gauze over the trembling eyes of a child fluttering to
sleep” (“The Season of Phantasmal Peace” 17-19). Here is a post-colonial poet
representing a woman in one of her natural states, motherhood, without the
vitriolic insensitivity of colonial authors. Walcot’s “mother” in this poem is
not being forced into this position or being depicted as an inanimate object
without choice, or motive. Instead, she is active in her caring capacity as a
mother tending to her trembling child. Women don’t have to be inactive parts of
society, no matter what job or function they serve. This relativistic view of
feminine activity places women on equal footing with men, allowing for an
asexualized literary expression.
Post-colonial literature is more than just
anti-colonial. When I first began this course, I fully expected the required
texts to decry all things in the canon. However, post-colonial literature has
proven to be more concerned with raising dregs instead of diminishing dominant
forms of literary expression. Recognizing the value of post-colonial literature
does not require the negation of colonial texts. Giving value to women does not
require devaluing men. Making the dominant equal to the other does not require
the weakening of either one; it just requires a careful evaluation of both. I do
believe that this is the most valuable lesson I will remain with me for years to
come.
Intertexuality: Religious Displacement
Although literature is a collection of separate
pieces of written works of artistic merit, no piece of literature exists in a
vacuum. All literature, whether large novels, small novellas, poems, or short
stories, are a mosaic of quotations that come together to create a larger
picture of what we all call literature. By this, I simply mean that all written
works are created to work with one another, allude to each other, and enhance
the past, present, and future culmination of literature. Reading literature with
this intertextual mindset allows one to make discoveries about individual pieces
that may have gone unnoticed. Colonizing people invade a land with their own
traditions and culture, and the assigned texts for this class revealed a pattern
regarding the colonizers approach to native religion. The colonized are usually
displaced and their way of life is regarded as inferior to the colonizers.
Several of the texts, although they span generations and continents, discussed in
this class depict a marked disrespect for native religions under the gaze of
Christian colonizers. Religion is, therefore, an agent of intertextuality that
combines works in a timeless and universal manner.
To make this argument, it is necessary to purport a
definition of Religion that is sufficient for this discussion. Religious belief
usually entails some sort of belief in god or gods. In most traditions, god
exists in a plane beyond the ephemeral world that humans can only reach by
meditation, death, or prayer. Along with god(s) people usually attach some sort
of moral code to religious belief, a set of boundaries that create convictions
relevant to everyday living (the Christian 10 commandments for example). A
simple definition, one I believe encompasses most viewpoints, is that religion
is a system of belief that imbues life with meaning. This definition is
purposefully ambiguous to include all of the varied beliefs of non-Western
peoples, such as Africa.
Africa is the centerpiece of
Chinua Achebe’s novel,
Things Fall Apart. This
novel portrays the colonization of Africa, specifically the Ibo people, by
European invaders. Tribal people often have religious practices that seem
superstitious and amusingly fictitious to Western readers. The Ibo believed
spirits ruled their villages and they allowed these spirits to make decisions
that affect the villager’s daily lives.
One puzzling instance is where Chielo, a priestess
of Agbala, comes to Okokwo’s compound in the middle of the night and takes one
of his daughters. The girl is not harmed but the priestess taking the child in
the middle of the night is met with little resistance. When the young girl’s
mother, Ekwefi, asks to accompany her daughter, Chielo says, “How dare you,
woman, to go before the mighty Agbala of your own accord? Beware unless he
strike you in his anger” (Achebe 101). And that is all. The Priestess snatches
up the daughter and runs off into the forest with little to no explanation. The
Ibo people had a deep respect for their traditions and followed them without
fail. When twins were born, this was considered an abomination; they were taken
into the jungle and left for dead. When two people had a disagreement they could
not settle, they called on the spirits of the Egwugwu for help. Although these
religious practices brought order to Ibo villages, European invaders viewed
these practices as caustic and pagan.
Mr. Kiaga represents European Christendom
initially. One of the first things Kiaga tells the Ibo people is, “We have now
built a church and we want you all to come in every seventh day to worship the
true God” (Achebe 150). Not only does Kiaga approach the native religious
practices with irreverence, he builds the church in a place called the Evil
Forest. The Ibos called this forest evil because it was where they “buried all
those who died of evil diseases, like leprosy and smallpox” (Achebe 148). The
colonizers in this novel show a complete disregard for the beliefs of the
natives. Instead of taking into consideration why and how the native people
arrived at their beliefs, Kiaga and others like him superimposed their own
belief systems. Religion served as a measure of relevance for the colonizers.
They allowed the natives to maintain beliefs that benefitted colonization, but
anything else was eliminated without impunity.
Colonizers often showed
disdain for the tribal values and prided themselves on their superior way of
thinking. In Conrad’s,
Heart of Darkness, he
portrays Europeans as being openly blunt in their disregard for colonial land.
One character says, “Anything--anything can be done in this country. That’s what
I say; nobody here, you understand, HERE, can endanger your position” (2.2). The
“civilized” laws of Europe are enforced on the native population, but many
European colonizers took advantage of Africa’s distance from their home country.
The colonizers brought along with them, along with many other things, a sense of
privilege and conditioned charity. Most colonizers, I am making an assumption
here, really wanted to help the natives initially, but the prospects of wealth
poisoned all pure acts of charity, turning good intentions to acts of
manipulation. Manipulating the religions of tribal people worked well by making
them “useful” to the colonizers.
Marlow describes an “improved
specimen” (2.7) that was aboard the boat with him traveling down the Congo.
Marlow assesses this improved native harshly. He says that watching the man work
with European instruments was like watching a “dog in a parody of breeches and a
feather hat” (2.7). This African has been transformed into a version of a white
man, not completely, only partially. He has been given white clothes, shoes, and
taught how to work with white instruments. However, the one thing the white
colonizers did not steal form this man was his religion. Marlow says that the
man was useful because he knew “that should the water in that transparent thing
disappear, the evil spirit inside the boiler would get angry through the
greatness of his thirst” (2.7). The colonizers here have given a pseudo
relevance to the African religious practices. Since this particular belief
served the European power, then it is permissible for this one African to
believe that evil spirits inhabit a water gauge. Religion is an agent of
repression in both
Things Fall Apart and
Heart of
Darkness. Both novels express, in their own
unique ways, how the colonizer, to control the colonized, uses religion. However
if not kept in check, religion can also become a weapon of resistance.
W.B. Yeats’s image of a “rough beast” (21) slouching
toward Bethlehem is the perfect image of how the colonized felt toward the
colonizers. Although civilized people probably feel that savages are encroaching
on holy ground, the reality is that Europeans invaded Africa, Europeans changed
the practices of tribal cultures, and European armies sweeping down from the
north looked appeared more like rough beasts than the Africans did. Europeans
may have controlled native religious practices with the hope of protecting the
gates of Christian belief, but they did so to the detriment of many Africans.
Reading all of these novels in concordance with one another allows for a deeper
understanding of how religion touches many areas of life. For both colonizer and
colonized, religion plays a big role in the outcome of cultures clashing.
Works Cited
Achebe, Chinua.
Things Fall A Part.
New York: Random House, 1959. Print.
Mukherjee, Bharati.
Jasmine.
New York: Grove Press, 1989. Print.
