Prejudice and the Colonial Condition in Post-Colonial Caribbean Literature - Essay Example

? Prejudice and the Colonial Condition in Post-Colonial Caribbean Literature Measuring people on the basis of their colour, race, and ethnicity has been a widespread phenomenon all over the world. Race, colour have been the parameters of assessing the ability of the person. White community is sick and has not been completely colour-blind. This approach has also built strong prejudices towards a certain community. The stereotype about certain people, culture and community inclines towards hatred, atrocity among different community. In the research paper the racial prejudice has been discussed thoroughly in context to colonialism. For the study, the three major literary works have been taken for discussion. They are “Small Island,” by Andrea Levy, “In the Castle of My Skin,” by George Lammings and a memoir of Jamaica Kindcaid called “A Small Place.” The three novels focus on the stereotypical view and bigotry among the colonizers and colonized people. Various characters from these books are the representatives of the contemporary human psyche. It’s a struggle between masters and slaves, between hatred and helplessness, between colonizers and colonized. The writers want to focus that the colonialism is a psyche and it will take a long time to disappear it from the minds of the colonized. Colonization suppressed self-respect, self-identity, and local religion of the native people of the colonies. With the help of other references, the paper throws the light on the racism, prejudices of both colonizers and colonized, and the colonial and post-colonial situation in the Caribbean Islands. Introduction: Racial prejudice has been a sinister social disease, spread all over the world for centuries. So called advanced White people still are backward in their views, intolerant and narrow minded towards the people from other race. The racial prejudice is the consequence of the differences in hair colour, eye colour, facial structure, size of limb and most important the skin colour. Racial prejudice takes place when people are judged on the basis of their superficial character and outward appearance. In American history the racial prejudice resulted into the exploitation of black people. During Second World War, Hitler had an extreme hatred towards Jew community. It resulted into relentless atrocities towards black people and Jews. To remove this social stigma, the modern societies have drafted and enacted various laws and statute to ensure that all the people from different races should get respect and should be considered equal. The racism has become one of the hot topics for debate especially after the Second World War. Caribbean islands had previously been the one of the major colonies of British Empire. Much has been written on colonial condition and racial prejudice in Caribbean literature. The authors like Laura Niesen De Aruna have written about racist and imperialist current in Caribbean literature. Frances A. Della Cava and Madeline H. Engel also have given examples of racial prejudice against Blacks, Jews, and Women in their fiction. After World War II people from Caribbean island were migrating to England. The impression about England was very noble among its colonies. They called England as “Mother Country,” but when they came on the land they found that they had no value in Britain and they were been treated as aliens. Our study throws light upon the post colonial racism and racial prejudices. The stigma of racial discrimination has been reflected in post colonial Caribbean Literature. The problems of immigration, the insecure feeling, uncertainty and biased, bigotry approach of English community towards the migrants had been the major issues depicted by the authors like Andrea Levy, George Lammings, Jamaica Kindcald and other writers. Keywords: Caribbean literature, racial prejudice, colonial conditions, bigotry, immigration During the World War II, the British colonies had no choice but to hold up with their masters, their British Empire. The colonized, for British people were not more than slaves. The War was imposed on the colonies by British rulers. For Caribbean colonies England was their Mother Country. But apart from fighting for their Mother Country in World War II, the black people were constantly becoming the victims of racism. When it was the time when the people from colonies needed help and support from their Mother Country, they got nothing but mortification. “A blunt memo went up on the ship’s notice board. It said, ‘conditions in England are not as favourable as you may think… Hard work is the order of the day. If you think you cannot pull your weight, you might as well decide to return to Jamaica, even if you have to swim the Atlantic.’” (Usha Mahadevan January 2010) In Andrea Levy’s Small Island for example, the character of Gilbert was abused on the basis of race. The racism in this novel is also seen in the character of Bernard, an unashamed racist. Thus they found that the land of Britain had given up the image of Mother Country. The migrant people were regarded as outsiders. The image of Britain was like a mother, but in their troublesome period they even could not be cuddled and loved by their mother. As stated by George Lammings,“Today I shudder to think how a country, so foreign to our own instincts, could have achieved the miracle of being called Mother. (In the Castle of my Skin, pg. Xxxviii) The colour was the major factor behind the prejudice towards colonized people. “A devout Christian, Curtis was asked not to return to his local church for his skin was too dark to worship there. The shock rob him of his voice. Louis now believed bloody foreigner to be all one word. For, like bosom pals, he only ever heard those words spoken together. And Hortense… fresh from a ship, England had not yet deceived her. But soon it will.” (Small Island, Pg. 269) The protagonist couple of Small Island, Hortense and her husband were being disgraced at every moment of their life in England. Even the taxi driver in England also thinks himself superior to Hortense. He has a prejudice about black people that they are barbarous, savage and do not know about the advance culture. This prejudice reflects in her sarcastic statement when he asks Hortense to ring the bell, “You know about bells and knockers? You got them where you come from?” A teacher from Jamaica, an educated lady was thus humiliated by a taxi driver who hardly knew what education was. The taxi driver and Hortense are the symbols of colonizer and colonized. The real virtues and the ability of human being are decided by his racial identity. Especially the cerebral and the people with outstanding qualities also never get respect from the colonizers. The superiority complex somewhere is there in their mind and they are not ready to accept the intellectual superiority of the people from colonies. Colonies for them are the abode of slaves and inferior people as the colonies have been conquered by their empire. This strong feeling of superiority is enough in boosting confidence and rudeness in them. The letters, certificate of ability did not matter anything in the school of London and the lady at the reception of the school just made fun of them and said that they are not useful there. ‘These letters don’t matter. You can’t teach in this country. You are not qualified to teach here in England.’ As Gilbert sums up the encounter, it is Hortense ‘reeling wounded after a sharp slap from the Mother Country’s hand’. This is also a misconception about English people that they are very hygienic or clean. But when Hortense watched the obnoxious deed of the person from bread shop, her misconception suddenly got shaken. Hortense’s husband Gilbert also was going through the same phase. He also had been victimized by the humiliation his mother country gave him due to the prejudice about colonies and black people. ‘‘The finest, best things are sent for the mother country as gift. When she needs help no price is too much. Leave home, leave familiar, leave love. Travel seas… shiver, tire, hunger. No sacrifice is too much.’ (Small Island, Pg.139) George Lammings also has also been victimized by the prejudice of English people towards the migrated colonized black people. It was a routine exercise of self – mutilation according to him. “Each represented for the other an image of enemy. And enemy was My people. My people are low-down nigger people. My people don’t like to see their people get on. The language of the overseer. The language of the civil servant..... Not taking chances with you people, my people. They always let you down. Make others say we’re not responsible, we have a sense of duty. Like children under the threat of hellfire they accepted instinctively that the others, meaning the white, were superiors, yet there was always the fear of realizing that it might be true. The world of the others’ imagined perfection hung like a dead weight over their energy. If the low-down nigger people weren’t what they are, the other couldn’t say anything about us. Suspicion, distrust, hostility. These operated in every decision. You never can tell with my people. It has the language of the overseer, the language of the Government servant, the later language of lawyers and doctors who had returned stamped like an envelope with what they called the culture of the Mother Country.” The prejudice and consequently the hatred had not just been limited to the foreigners in England, but it was there among the city dwellers, upper class Londoners despise cockneys. Probably due to the devastation, decay during the World War II had made the English people excruciating. They were undergoing through a worst condition due to the consequences of the War. The immigrants from colonies were making them more excruciating which resulted into building prejudice in their minds. The cultural prejudice spread among the multiculturalism status in Post War England. In front of the English people the poor and deprived people from colonies have no mind, feelings, and passions. “How could people like these, without words to put to their emotions and passions, manage? They could, at best, only suffer dumbly. Their pains and humiliations would work themselves out in their characters alone: like evil spirits possessing a body, so that the body itself might appear innocent of what it did.” (V.S. Naipaul, 1988) Racial prejudice is between the white people either from England or America. Both of these lands are like dreamland and the people from their dreamlands are like angels for Caribbean people. They landed here as a rulers, as a tourists. But while coming on the land there is always a stereotypical opinion in their minds about Caribbean land. They look at it as a tourist spot, as a colony. The people of the land are also a part of scenery for them. Jamaica Kincaid for example, is cynical about American culture and British culture. She expressed the biased approach of the white people towards Antigua. Kincaid’s hatred towards English people is due to the reason that they had populated the island with their slaves and made her countrymen admire the British Empire who enslaved them. This same feeling has been expressed by George Lammings when he states the experience of his first journey towards England: “Migration was not a word I would have used to describe what I was doing when I sailed with other West Indians to England in 1950. We simply thought that we were going to an England which had been planted in our childhood consciousness as a heritage and a place of welcome. It is the measure of our innocence that neither the claim of heritage nor the expectation of welcome would have been seriously doubted. England was not for us a country with classes and conflicts of interest like the islands we had left. It was the name of responsibility whose origin may have coincided with the beginning of time. (In the Castle of my Skin, pg. Xxxviii) Racial superiority has always been preserved by English people and the people from their colonies had accepted their superiority. It is general presumption that ignorance, backwardness, and lack of sophistication is associated with colour, and coloured people always are regarded as barbarians. This was complete racial prejudice and ignorance of British people about the colonies. Take the example of India. The image of India has been built in the minds of European people as a country of barbarian people and India is the land of tigers and elephants and jungles. They hardly know that India has a prolonged history as well as rich civilization, of more than 20,000 years. India has been the abode of intellectuality, spirituality and ancient philosophy for thousands of years. When Indian civilization was at its peak, America and Britain were nowhere in the map of the world. Colonization in Caribbean Islands: “Colonialism is not satisfied merely with holding a people in its grip and emptying the native’s brain of all form and content. By a kind perverted logic, it turns to the past of the oppressed people, and distort, disfigures and destroy it. This work of devaluing pre-colonial history takes on a dialectical significance today” ( Fanon , Frantz 1967) Caribbean islands have been the colonies of British Empire. The British Emprire was ruling their land as well as their mind. Their mindset has been shaped in such a manner that they felt it proud when their land was called as “Little England.” The people of British colonies had lost their self identity and self respect due to colonization. On page 39 of “In the Castle of My Skin,” an incident is described where the inspector comes to the boys’ school to proclaim Barbados as “Little England.” The children cheer the proclamation and gratified in calling their land “England.” Like George Lammings, Jamaica Kindcad also had the same experience of lost of independence. She felt first-hand the negative effects of British colonialism as the colonists attempted to turn Antigua "into England" and the natives "into English" without regard for the native culture or homeland (Kincaid 24). The citizens of the country which has been the colony of British lost the patriotism, the pride of their culture and civilization. The rulers, the emperors, the conquerors and the colonizers imposed their culture, history on colonized people and compelled them to forget their own cultural roots. Edward Wilmot says, “All our traditions and experiences are connected with foreign race – we have no poetry but that of our taskmakers. The songs which live in our ears and are often on our lips are the songs we heard sung by those who shouted while we groaned and lamented. They sang of their history, which was the history of our degradation. They recited their triumphs, which contained the records of our humiliation. To our great misfortune, we learned their prejudices and their positions, and thought we had their aspiration and their power.” (Blyden, Edward 1990) Lamming also commented on the colonial system of education by using the third-person narratives. The structure of the school was exactly like the schools of Britain. In the schools the needs and the interest of black pupils in Barbados or anywhere in Caribbean island had not been taken into consideration. The young students knew very few things about the concept of Kings and Queens, of Empire, or of that rare commodity: money. “This face on the penny was very fascinating. Could you have a penny without a face? They looked at it closely and critically, and made notes of their observations. How did the face get there? The question puzzled them. Some said it was a drawing of the king made with a pin while the copper was soft ... It was a long and patient undertaking. But it had to be done if there was going to be any money at all, and everyone knew how important money was. It was difficult but necessary. That was not feasible, some though. In fact it was very silly to argue that such a job would be done by sensible people. And the English who were the only people in the world to deal with pennies were very sensible. You couldn't involve a king in all that nonsense of melting down copper and making a drawing. And how would he find the time to sit till all those million pennies were done?” (p. 53) After attaining independence the behaviour of the people from colonies had not changed but remained same. Kindcaid criticized this mentality of her people. “Just as they have adopted the behaviors of colonialism, the natives have "absorbed" the event of tourism "so completely that they have made the degradation and humiliation of their daily lives into their own tourist attraction" (Kincaid 69). The colonialism had ended from, Caribbean countries. Even after the independence also the Caribbean countries such as Antigua have become financially dependent, dependent on the white skin people. The critical approach of Kindcaid is expressed by Bonham Richardson. He says, “Billboards throughout the region remind (black) local residents to put on happy smiles for (white) tourists. . . .So groups of tourists can be typically loud and offensive while expecting deferential servility from their “hosts.” Caribbean governments, with an eye on tourist profits, reinforce these expectations. It is perhaps needless to point out that this economically imposed servility is galling in light of the obvious (at least to the Caribbean peoples) inequities.” (Bonham C. Richardson, 1992) Jamaica Kindcard expresses her sarcastic attitude towards the white tourist people in her memoir. We are not sure whether her approach is prejudiced or genuine. But whatever bitter feelings she has for the white people must have come from her own experience. “An ugly thing, that is what you are when you become a tourist, an ugly empty thing, a stupid thing, a piece of rubbish pausing here and there to gaze at this and taste that, and it will never occur to you that the people who inhabit the place in which you have just paused cannot stand you, that behind their closed doors they laugh at your strangeness.” [17] Her words become sharper when she blames the corruption of Antigua and its colonial past: “They [the English] don’t seem to know that this empire business was all wrong and they should, at least, be wearing sackcloth and ashes in token penance of the wrongs committed, the irrevocableness of their bad deeds, for no natural disaster imaginable could equal the harm they did. Actual death might have been better. And so all this fuss over empire – what went wrong here, what went wrong there – always makes me quite crazy, for I can say to them what went wrong: they should never have left their homes, their precious England, a place they loved so much, a place they had to leave but could never forget. And so everywhere they went they turned it into England; and everybody they met they turned English. But no place could ever really be England, can imagine the destruction of people and land that came from that.” [23-24] Colonization and religion: Exploitation, suppression, colonization and Christianization are the main objectives of the British conquerors while ruling on their colonies. Colonization made its impact on the existing religious system of the colonies. The original religion was supposed to be primitive and not suitable. The Christian missionaries imposed their own religion by inflicting their opinion how their religion, Christianity is the only true religion. The conquerors had made the minds of the people in such a way that they started believing and following their masters blindly. The approach is there in Daniel Defoe’s “Robinson Crusoe.” With his tongue, pen and Bible, Crusoe is able to assert that he is the superior and he is the master. He is the symbol of British or the colonizer, whereas the character Friday is the symbol of colonized. It is the attempt of the colonizers to impose their opinion on the native people of their colonies that their traditional religion is meaningless and how Christianity is strong. Like the Christian Missionaries Crusoe diplomatically converts Friday into Christianity and then Crusoe assigned Friday and his father a very inferior, dirty and difficult task of building a boat for Crusoe. All the native people according to the colonizers were savages and they deserved meaningless and inferior work. James Joyce has also identified some models of colonial experience in the book Robinson Crusoe in the form of colonization, subjugation, exploitation and Christianization of the colonized “The true symbol of British conquest is Robinson Crusoe, who cast away on the desert island, in his pocket a knife and a pipe, becomes an architect, a carpenter, a knife grinder, an astronomer, a baker, a shipwright, a potter, a saddler, a farmer, a tailor, an umbrella maker and a clergyman. He is the true prototype of the British colonist; a Friday (the trusty savage who arrives on an unlucky day) is the symbol of the subject races.” (Gallaghar Susan.1991) Andrea Levy, George Lammings, Jamaica Kindcad, all these three authors are telling the same story of racial prejudice and colonial attitude of British people towards the Caribbean colonies. Colonialism is still there in the minds of the citizens of Caribbean countries. For British people the people from the colonies are slaves, black, niggers and they are born to serve them. They are always suspicious about the ability of black people. The people like Jamaica, G, Hortense, Gilbert all have been the victims of colonization. Their dreams have been shattered, so as their image toward the Mother Country after suffering humiliation and disgrace at every step of their life. Their Mother Country actually proved to be a very diplomatic and cruel lady who snatched away everything of their own from them. The colonizers imposed their rules, cultures, education and religion and compelled them to forget their own culture and identity. But at the same time never consider them as English people. They had never been accommodated in them and accepted by the white community in England. They were always “Niggers” for white people. All the Caribbean country became independent from British rule but have they really escaped from their past status of colonized, slave? And this is the tragedy of almost all countries which have been the British colonies in the past. Their struggle of genuine liberation is still going on. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Sources: 1. Andrea Levy (2010)“Small Island.” 2. Blyden Edward, (1990) Wilmot, Christianity, Islam and the Negro Race. Chesapeake, New York: ECA, 1990.) 3. Bonham C. Richardson, (1992) The Caribbean in the Wider World 1492–1992: A Regional Geography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), Pg. 127. 4. Gallaghar Susan A Story of South Africa: J.M. Coetzee’s Fiction in Context. London: Harvard University Press, 1991, pg 170) 5. George Lammings, “ In the Castle of My Skin.” 6. Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks: New York: Grove Press 1967 Pg. 168 7. Jamaica Kindcad, “A Small Place.” 8. Usha Mahadevan (2010) “England of Andrea Levy’s Small Island: Dreams and Realities.” 9. Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul (1998) “The Enigma of Arrival” Published by Read More