Mariel Amez
Literature in English III Unit 2
Postcolonial literature You have already analysed the central features of colonialist discourse. It is now time to look at the reactions to it, before and after independence movements. Writing from the Empire During the first half of the 20th century the white monopoly on imperial writing was broken, as colonized elites began to organize cultural revivals or raised their voices in protest at imperial power. […] the movements sought, in the first instance, an inversion of imperial values. […] The message they communicated was distinguished by a strenuous defence of the virtues of native culture, characterized as rich, pure and authentic (hence the term nativist). The idea was that the people’s identity, though long suppressed, lay embedded in its cultural origins and was recoverable intact, unadulterated by the depredations of colonialism. […] literary conventions and discourses inherited from the coloniser were appropriated, translated, decentred, and hybridized in ways which we now term postcolonial but were in fact at the time anti-colonial. [… ] Retreat and disillusion on the side of empire were accompanied by resistance and reconstruction on the part of those who spoke for the colonised. (Boehmer 96-97) However, in settler-contact zones (where colonist Europeans came into direct interaction with indigenous populations) the material and cultural position of the white settlers or the creoles (their descendants) was clearly demarcated from that of the native population. In South Africa or Australia, for example, a system of internal colonisation rigidly separated settler society from the native population. Yet, white colonial society was itself marginalised, as it remained subordinated to London. In response to this situation, settler and creole writers became concerned to legitimate from their particular geographic and cultural perspective a subjectivity distinct, even if adapted, from Europe. Like later black nationalists, though less militantly so, they felt the need for an authenticating history. They cast about for myths of origin: tales of early pioneering, sagas involving settlers, trekkers, or bushcutters in the interior. And they too attempted to hammer out on the anvil of their experience a language more closely moulded to their environment. (Boehmer 106) Settler and creole nationalists in different parts of the Empire shared their views of the world, since they belonged to privileged minorities with similar schooling and jobs in the civil service. In contrast, they had little in common with the masses in their own countries. From the moment of their genesis, therefore, nationalist élites were caught in a situation of split perception or double vision. Bilingual and bicultural, having Janus-like access to both metropolitan and local cultures, yet alienated from both, the élites who sought to challenge aspects of imperial rule also found they might gain advantages from making compromises with it. (Boehmer 110) Native nationalists “adopted the persona of the enlightened English gentleman – more correct, more colonialist, more English in fact than the real item” but “(e)ven in their efforts to be the same they were marked as different. They mimicked Europeans and were ridiculed for their mimicry.” (Boehmer 111) As a result, nationalist writers, whether native or creole, were in search of their self and struggled to romanticize the past. The subject matter often dealt with the following themes:
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Mariel Amez
Literature in English III Unit 2
childhood homecoming separation return They also tried to convert the stereotyped images of imperial writing into positive qualities. Some writers chose to keep colonialist divisions in place while inverting their meaning, e.g. highlighting the sensitivity, spirituality, and harmony of their culture against the harsh pragmatism of Europe. Both approaches also permitted retrospect as aspiration. Both were concerned with recovering an identity fragmented, displaced, or discredited under colonialism in order to reconstitute cultural integrity and, in this way, to construct a vision of an independent future. […] The past and the land, the land as embodiment of the values of the past, provided sources of authenticity, primarily for the nation emerging from its history of colonial occupation, but also, more specifically, for its intellectual elite. That the land was in more cases than not pictured as maternal, or as abused and adored female body, while leadership was figured as masculine, points to the dominant gender configurations of early colonial nationalist movements. (Boehmer 116) Independence Indian and Pakistani independence in 1947 represents the beginning of the high period of decolonization. In Africa, Ghana, Nigeria, Tanzania, Algeria, Kenya and Zambia, and across the Atlantic, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago and Barbados, all won independence between 1957 and 1966. Many writers answered the call to make literature a moving spirit in the nationalist struggle and a factor in the transformation of social life. The writer’s role was to reinterpret the world to achieve cultural self-definition. (W)riting – in particular perhaps the novel – was used to project autonomous identity, to re-create traditional, communal relationships within new national formations, or otherwise to promote socialist or collectivist forms of social bonding. […] in postcolonial criticism the process of national self-making in story and symbol is often called imagining the nation. What this phrase implies is that the nation as we know it is a thing of social artifice – a symbolic formation rather than a natural essence. (Boehmer 176) To conceive an independent national identity, postcolonial writers concentrated on developing a symbolic vocabulary that was recognizably indigenous – or at least other to European representation – and yet at the same time intelligible within a global grammar of post-war politics. (Boehmer 179) One of the priorities, thus, was to cancel colonial stereotypes. Whereas Europe had represented the pre-conquest period as a blank, unmarked by any sort of significant action or achievement, writers searched for evidence of a rich and varied pre-colonial existence, tales of military victory against colonial forces, portraits of defiant or self-determining leaders, so that once-colonized writers could represent themselves as subjects of their own past. Two of the distinctive genres chosen in the independence period were: the communal biography: the cultural life of a particular group is made to represent a broader history the symbolic autobiography: personal histories, reminiscences, prison memoirs with a wider national reference. 2
Mariel Amez
Literature in English III Unit 2
(N)ative characters could now be portrayed not as the passive onlookers and victims of European action, but as subjects of their own history: fighting amongst themselves, plotting, making mistakes, failing or succeeding. (Boehmer 186) Kerschner summarises some recurrent themes in postcolonial writing: […] a number of themes emerge from a study of literatures as disparate as those of New Zealand pakeha (white settlers), Indians, and Kenyans. Among these are the struggle toward independence in the individual and in the community, the dominance of a foreign culture on indigenous life, and even specific motifs such as the construction or demolition of a house or the journey taken by a European interloper with a native guide. (Kerschner 87) The journey Many “acts of remembering” that characterize post-independence writing revolve around the metanarrative of journeying and return, realized for instance as a pilgrimage the road or path connecting disparate realities (town and city, past and present/ future, life and afterlife) wandering migration exile/ banishment or focus on specific episodes of journeying: childhood and the dawn of self-consciousness severance and departure the loss of roots, home, or motherland homecoming (under a range of moods, from celebration to disillusionment) In their myriad narratives of journeying we see how postcolonial writers have managed, through a process of mass imaginative appropriation, to hijack one of the defining stories of imperial expansion: the traveller's tale, the voyage into mystery, to the heart of darkness. Tales of occupation and settlement plotted from the colonial centre to the colonies have been supplanted by journeys from the hinterland to the city – with the extra inflection of the final moment of homecoming and return. Another reverse narrative in the same genre is the pilgrimage into a spiritual reality obscure to Europe. Incorporating indigenous cultural material, defiant of western authority, the postcolonial quest seeks mastery not in the first instance over land or other peoples, but of history and self. (Boehmer 192) Indigenous myth Another frequent technique to retrieve the past was resorting to indigenous myth. Using conceptual structures drawn from local tradition, writers tried to integrate the cultural life of
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Mariel Amez
Literature in English III Unit 2
the past with their post-independence, westernized reality. The gods, daemons, half-children, warriors, and strange beasts of local legend and oral epic offered a rich resource for cultures seeking redefinitions of community and identity. Crossing the adventures of indigenous gods with European realism, superimposing images from other worlds on Westernized city landscapes, post-independence writers relied on an intensely practical hybridity – the blending of their different cultural influences, an upfront and active syncretism – to unsettle the inheritance of Europe. […] No matter how determined were writers' efforts at reclamation, in a postcolonial society coming to terms with the corrosion of tradition during colonial occupation, cultural purity was not on offer. Indigenous myth could not give automatic access to a national essence or 'soul'. Yet, far from syncretism being a disadvantage, the powerful mutating energies of mixed genres like the myth-based novel or the Caribbean or African modernist poem made available symbolic languages with which to signify the vivid contrasts of expanding post-independence cities. (Boehmer 194) Appropriation The adaptation of European cultural myths for nationalist purposes was another frequent strategy. For the once colonized to interpret Homer or Shakespeare or Dante on their own terms meant staking a claim to European tradition from beyond its conventional boundaries. Take-over or appropriation was in its way a bold refusal of cultural dependency. It signified that the powerful paradigms represented by Europe's canonical texts were now mobilized in defence of what had once been seen as secondary, unorthodox, deviant, primitive. The colonized laid claim to the right of speech. (Boehmer 195) The texts that were regarded as the icons of European culture, and especially those that symbolized its claims to authority, became the object of repeated native/colonized appropriations: The Tempest, Robinson Crusoe, 'Heart of Darkness'. Inverted writings stage a contest to read reality in a different way – from an angle unimaginable to the colonizer Disruption can also, of course, take place at the level of structure and narrative voice, or foregrounding the roles of formerly marginalized historical actors – a sweeper, a peasant, a slave, an island child, a guerrilla fighter, a fisherman. Language Language choice, together with the recovery of history, was one of the issues of greatest significance in the nationalist writing of independence, and a key source of contention in the effort to define identity. Lye outlines On a simple political/cultural level, there are problems with the fact that to produce a literature which helps to reconstitute the identity of the colonized one may have to function in at the very least the means of production of the colonizers -- the writing, publishing, advertising and production of books, for instance. These may well require a centralized economic and cultural system which is ultimately either a western import or a hybrid form, uniting local conceptions with western conceptions. The concept of producing a national or cultural literature is in most cases a concept foreign to the traditions of the colonized peoples, who (a) had no literature as it is conceived in the western traditions or in fact no literature or writing at all, and/or b) did not see art as having the same function as constructing and defining cultural identity,
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Mariel Amez
Literature in English III Unit 2
and/or c) were, like the peoples of the West Indies, transported into a wholly different geographical/political/economic/cultural world. (India, a partial exception, had a longestablished tradition of letters; on the other hand it was a highly balkanized subcontinent with little if any common identity and with many divergent sub-cultures). It is always a changed, a reclaimed but hybrid identity, which is created or called forth by the colonizeds' attempts to constitute and represent identity. The very concepts of nationality and identity may be difficult to conceive or convey in the cultural traditions of colonized peoples. There are complexities and perplexities around the difficulty of conceiving how a colonized country can reclaim or reconstitute its identity in a language that is now but was not its own language, and genres which are now but were not the genres of the colonized. One result is that the literature may be written in the style of speech of the inhabitants of a particular colonized people or area, which language use does not read like Standard English and in which literature the standard literary allusions and common metaphors and symbols may be inappropriate and/or may be replaced by allusions and tropes which are alien to British culture and usage. It can become very difficult then for others to recognize or respect the work as literature (which concept may not itself have relevance -- see next point). There other are times when the violation of the aesthetic norms of western literature is inevitable, 1. as colonized writers search to encounter their culture's ancient yet transformed heritage, and 2. as they attempt to deal with problems of social order and meaning so pressing that the normal aesthetic transformations of western high literature are not relevant, make no sense. The idea that good or high literature may be irrelevant and misplaced at a point in a culture's history, and therefore for a particular cultural usage not be good literature at all, is difficult for us who are raised in the culture which strong aesthetic ideals to accept. Works cited Boehmer, Elleke. Colonial and Postcolonial Literature. Migrant Metaphors. 2nd ed.. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Kerschner, R.B. The Twentieth-Century Novel. An Introduction. Boston and New York: Bedford Books, 1997. Lye, John . "Some Issues in Postcolonial Theory ." English 4F70. 30 April 2008. Department of Language and Literature Brock University. 8 Mar 2009 .
Visit the following links to complement the discussion of these concepts : Hybridity "Hybridity" http://www.qub.ac.uk/schools/SchoolofEnglish/imperial/key-concepts/Hybridity.htm
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Mariel Amez
Literature in English III Unit 2
Mimicry "Mimicry, Ambivalence and Hybridity" http://www.english.emory.edu/Bahri/1WEBPAGE.HTML Strategies of appropriation "Othering & Writing Back " http://www.qub.ac.uk/schools/SchoolofEnglish/imperial/transnational/Othering.html The language debate "Ngugi Wa Thiongo and Chinue Achebe on the Politics of Language and Literature in Africa" http://www.glpinc.org/Classroom%20Activities/Kenya%20Articles/Ngugi%20Wa%20Thiong'oOn%20Language%20and%20Culture.htm "Subversion versus Rejection: Can Postcolonial Writers Subvert the Codified Using the Language of the Empire?" http://www.postcolonialweb.org/poldiscourse/brandon1.html "The Language of Imperial Expansion" http://www19.homepage.villanova.edu/silvia.nagyzekmi/2introduction2.doc
Material originally designed by Mariel Amez in 2009 for the course Literary Studies I, Licenciatura en Lengua Inglesa, Resistencia, Universidad Tecnológica Nacional.
How to Cite this Work Amez, Mariel. “Postcolonial literature.” 2009. PDF file.
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