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Sample Final Exam submissions 2015 (2015 final exam assignment) Essay 2 Sample |
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Assignment: Referring to Objectives 1 & 2, compose a dialogue between at least four texts (at least 3 since midterm) on a topic, theme, issue, or objective of your choice (Objectives in addition to 1 & 2 may be included.)
Caryn Livingston
The
Beginning is the End is the Beginning: Post-Colonial Millennialism
An extensive topic of discussion in this class has related to
the way colonial powers often introduced societies they colonized to the idea of
the end of days, which figures prominently in the Abrahamic religions. Because
colonialism was often devastating to the previous way of life of colonized
people, they tended to accept the belief that the destruction of their world was
imminent. This belief in the destabilization of normal life and the impending
apocalypse is known academically as millennialism, and plays major roles in
several colonial and post-colonial texts, including
Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
and W.B. Yeats’ poem “The Second Coming.” However, while the advent of
millennialism and the devastation colonialism brings to the cultures it
encounters is the focus of some colonial and post-colonial writing, especially
those written from the perspective of a member of the colonized society, other
post-colonial writers take a more optimistic approach. In Bharati Mukherjee’s
novel Jasmine and in Derek Walcott’s
poem “The Season of Phantasmal Peace,” the authors express hope that people can
move past the first destruction that occurs with colonialism and continue life
alongside other societies in a new, enlarged world.
Achebe’s novel Things Fall Apart
embraces the idea of colonialism bringing the end of things—hence its title,
taken from Yeats’ poem that brims with apocalyptic imagery. In the novel, when
white men begin the missionary and colonizing processes of the region around the
village Umuofia, things begin to change in ways that the protagonist Okonkwo
cannot understand. Okonkwo is a very traditional man who honors the traditions
of his clan and whose life is totally rooted in his immediate surroundings and
goals. When the modernizing colonial force begins to encroach on his way of
life, Okonkwo first believes that he will be able to coexist with it or even
overcome it through his more traditional values. Even when his oldest son
rejects Okonkwo’s way of life to join the missionaries, Okonkwo believes he can
raise his other sons to continue his traditional way of life. Once it becomes
clear to him that the other members of his clan do not agree that they should
all reject the changes colonialism is bringing, “Okonkwo was deeply grieved. And
it was not just a personal grief. He mourned for the clan, which he saw breaking
up and falling apart, and he mourned for the warlike men of Umuofia, who had so
unaccountably become soft like women” (Achebe 183). Okonkwo’s grief is for the
end of his way of life, a very millennial idea, and through the genre of the
novel Achebe is able to communicate the larger idea of a loss of a way of life
to readers through the example of only one character’s sense of loss.
Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness
presents a similar idea, although from a different angle. When Conrad’s narrator
Marlow says, “And this also has been one of the dark places of the earth,” (Part
1, par 8) the fear is that even those cultures like colonial England that
embrace modernism are facing the end of their civilization, and that their own
colonial pursuits are leading them to the apocalypse. Marlow says, “We live in
the flicker—may it last as long as the old earth keeps rolling! But darkness was
here yesterday” (Conrad Part 1, par 11). Again, the concern presented is that
through the meeting of cultures, at least one of them will be forever changed or
even destroyed. Conrad extends this concern further, with the idea that the
colonial experiments are also detrimental to the European colonists. Regarding
its effects on Kurtz, Marlow says, “He had taken a high seat amongst the devils
of the land—I mean literally” (Conrad Part 2 par 29). The idea here is that when
colonists undertake to rule over foreign people, the colonists are as likely to
lose their identity as the colonized people. The colonial contact is sufficient
to bring about the sort of cultural change associated with millennialism.
Conrad’s expression of the idea that Europeans will be somehow tainted even
through ruling colonized people does come across to modern readers as very
racist and ethnocentric, which is what makes Okonkwo’s competing perspective,
which,
though different from Marlow’s,
is not less civilized, important to understanding the two-sided relationship
colonialism creates. Reading the two novels in dialogue with one another allows
for both perspectives to come across on a personal scale. While some people
among both the colonized and colonizer groups feel they have benefitted from the
cultural contact, the main characters in both novels see the disintegration of
their respective worlds in the new ideas and relationships colonialism
introduces into both groups.
“The Second Coming” reinforces the millennial fears of both
Heart of Darkness
and Things Fall Apart. The opening
lines of the poem, “Turning and
turning in the widening gyre / The falcon cannot hear the falconer;” (ll. 1-2)
are reminiscent of the concerns Conrad has in
Heart of Darkness. As Europe
stretched its various empires across the world, those who actually travelled to
the lands under colonial control lost touch with some aspects of European
society and became more acclimated to life in the colonies, as Kurtz did to
disastrous effect. The next line, from which Achebe drew his title, suggests the
dangers to the way of life the characters would like to protect. As life as they
know it seems to be at an end, they have very little hope for the future. The
last lines of the poem, “And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, /
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?” embody the fears of millennialist belief
completely (ln 21-22). Marlow, Okonkwo, and the narrative voice in “The Second
Coming” clearly expect nothing but catastrophe from the directions their
civilizations are headed.
Not all narrators see the interactions of cultures in such a negative
light, even when those interactions were instigated through colonialism. In
Jasmine, the titular character
instead sees India’s connection with western countries as an opportunity to
remake herself while maintaining aspects of her own culture. Jasmine embraces
the idea of reincarnation from her upbringing in India, but after her husband is
killed and she has the chance to live with his mentor in New York, she rejects
the opportunity to continue living enmeshed in a transplanted version of the
culture she was raised in, and reinterprets the idea of reincarnation to mean
that she can reinvent herself in America. Jasmine is aware of the societal
problems she faced in India, like the sectarian violence and the restrictions
placed on her as a widow, and decides that her connection with the larger world
grants her an opportunity to create several new lives for herself outside the
expectations of her family. She is unlike Okonkwo, who grieved for the changes
colonialism brought to his traditional culture, but she is more like Okonkwo’s
son, who saw an opportunity presented by the colonizing society that his society
didn’t have and pursued it.
While Jasmine’s story, as a novel, was a very personal depiction of a woman who found advantages to a more connected world for which colonialism was responsible, “The Season of Phantasmal Peace” takes a more universal, positive stance on the possibilities for a world connected across cultures. The poem depicts a time when diversity is overlooked for a common goal of improvement, and the mass benefit to the world that such a change in attitude would be. “Then all the nations of birds lifted together / the huge net of the shadows of this earth / in multitudinous dialects, twittering tongues, / stitching and crossing it” (Walcott ln 1-4). The speaker in the poem recognizes how rare such an occasion is and doesn’t seem to expect people to come together behind a common goal for any real period of time as society exists currently; as he says, “this season lasted one moment, like the pause / between dusk and darkness, between fury and peace, / but, for such as our earth is now, it lasted long” (ln 33-35). He remains aware, just as Jasmine is when she recognizes her husband’s killer in the park in New York, that violence of changing cultures is still very much present in the current time. While the poetry allows for a universal and seemingly more disinterested perspective on how intercultural exchange could benefit humanity, Jasmine gives readers a personal view of how such a thing might be accomplished. They both embrace the possibilities of modernity, with its opportunities for human equality and the exchange of ideas freely across the world.
