Compare and Contrast the Novels of Maru by Bessie Head and Massacre River by Rene Philoctete - Essay Example

of the of the Ethnic Discrimination in Maru and Massacre River Q. Compare and contrast the novels of Maru by Bessie Head and Massacre River by Rene Philoctete with respect to their discussion of ethnic discrimination. How do they orchestrate their plots to make their respective points about equality and discrimination? Introduction One often marvels at the wonders of colonialism and what it has supposedly achieved for the natives of the colonies. Influenced by the writing and historical accounts of western writers, most of whom are notoriously biased and one sided, we readily jump to the conclusion that it has lifted Asia and the dark continent of Africa out of the wilderness and backwardness and brought to it the fruits of Western civilization. Yet colonization is a two-edged sword. As Joseph Conrad pointed out in Heart of Darkness (Conrad, 8), colonization was undertaken for specific motives, the most direct being to loot and plunder the resources of these conquered lands and send them back to the home country. It also served to make the natives subservient and compliant to the colonizers, who viewed them as nothing more than cheap labor. The truth is that colonization not only robbed the African natives of local resources, it also robbed them of respect and love for their own culture, as Achebe aptly notes in Things Fall Apart (Achebe, 14). They were like lost souls riding on a tide of fear and the unknown. The colonizers were well known for creating strife and disunity among the different tribes that inhabited these lands, for their own long term benefit. Let us therefore look at the accounts of Bessie Head in Maru (1995) and Rene Philoctete in Massacre River (2005) as they give a local flavor to the events and also are an eye opener, being accounts of ethnic discrimination and strife from the viewpoint of the oppressed. Therein lies their value. Discussion Frederick Mlaponi writes that colonialism is but an euphemism for a land or people being conquered by another through force or cunning or both. The Europeans had come to Africa and Asia in the late eighteenth century subsequent to the Industrial Revolution in their own countries. They were in search of cheap labor and other material resources in order to supplement the demands back home (www.contentcaboodle.com). As we know, besides their industrial and intellectual wealth neither Britain, nor the Dutch, Portuguese, French or any of the other sea powers had the natural or mineral resources that are so much in abundance on the African and Asian continents. Like Columbus before them, they sought out these journeys to bring fame and glory to themselves and their homelands. Even if we look at the signs of progress in transport, communication and other infrastructure, a little reflection will show that this was all for the benefit of the colonizers rather than the colonized. It either made ruling the natives easy or helped them with looting the resources they came for. Since the colonizers were definitely at a disadvantage in terms of numbers, they sought to divide and rule the natives as best they could. Preventing a unity on any account, they would use customs, traditions, false stories and rumors and even religious beliefs to divide and put the natives against each other, in tune with their desires and motives. The natives were thus concerned with who would get the most out of their masters while preventing other ethnic groups from doing so. It was the dog and the bone game with the loser getting nothing. The novel Maru begins with the incident of a Masarwa woman dying while giving birth to a baby girl. The girl is thus orphaned at birth. There is a political feud going on between the Botswanan and Masarwa tribes. Even the Botswanan nurses under the administration of the missionaries refuse to touch the dead woman or take care of the child. It is left up to the missionary’s wife, Margaret Cadmore, to rescue the child and raise it. She is disgusted with the way these prejudices have deep rooted themselves in the villager’s lives. Cadmore does not bother to name the girl (who herself takes on her adopted mother’s name later on) and often treats her more like a servant than a daughter. Nevertheless the mother is determined to give her daughter a good education, teaching her the value of freedom and self expression. Like her adopted mother, the daughter also shows a fondness and talent for sketching. But the reality is that her life is lonely and boring. Regarded as a mulatto child, she is often mocked and mistreated by the other children and leads a solitary existence. She thus grows up being alienated from her adopted mother while not being accepted by her African roots as well. Experts have regarded the character of the child to be a reflection of the author Bessie Head herself, as she was the offspring of an influential white woman and a black man, born during the unfortunate and tumultuous times of the apartheid era in Soweto, South Africa. When the child grows up, she decides to be a teacher. Margaret’s foster mother tells her: “One day, you will help your people.” This “created a purpose and burden in... [her] mind” (Head, 17). The story moves on to when the younger Margaret arrives at Dilepe to teach at the local school. Due to her light skin she is taken to be coloured, but she decides to be truthful and tells her story to anyone who wants to know. Needless to say, this truthfulness backfires when word gets out that she is a Bushmen and she is treated with scorn once again due to her race. She states: “I can’t understand beastliness because it would never occur to me to be beastly” (Head, 18).However she has made a friend in a colleague Dikeledi, who helps her to find lodging through her lover Moleka. Moleka and Maru are two young men, friends since childhood and living in the same village. They are well respected and destined to be the chieftains of their respective tribes. Moleka falls in love with Margaret even though he hardly knows her. But he is hesitant when he finds out the truth of Margaret’s past, since he does not want to go against the traditions of his tribe. Meanwhile Maru also falls in love with Margaret and uses his friend’s hesitance to his advantage. He gives Margaret a bed (although it is later taken back from her) and also asks his sister Dikeledi to commission sketches on his behalf just so he can make acquaintance with her. This state of affairs later causes a rift between the two friends and makes them rivals. Maru proposes to Margaret, she accepts and they get married. In reality Maru is a bit of a dreamer and an idealist who has an idea that by marrying Margaret he will share her life and broad outlook on life, free of discrimination and racial hatred. On their part the Masarwa tribe are confident and pleased that under the leadership and guidance of Maru and Margaret, they can enter a new world of freedom and equality which is not dominated by such things as prejudice and racial discrimination. Although Margaret does not really love Maru we see that she accepts him as a life partner because it is her chance to escape from alienation and become part of the community. In doing thus, she becomes "a little bit of everything in the whole universe”(Head, 20). She at last has someone and something to belong to. “Who knew where life and destiny would take...[her] as long as their lives were attached to Maru?”(Head, 6). Meanwhile, Moleka gets Dikeledi pregnant and marries her. Margaret is “the best woman in the world”, while Maru “had ensured that Moleka had the next best woman in the world” (Head, 9). His refusal to be as daring and visionary as his friend Maru seals his fate as well. In this novel, the author Bessie Head has raised her voice against the ugliness of racial discrimination. Her protagonist and the heroine of the novel Margaret Cadmore struggles time and again against the prejudices and evils of a discriminatory society, while at the same time being the lone voice of freedom in this wilderness. While the elder Cadmore takes on the responsibility of a mother without actually being one herself, the younger Margaret shows that we are all capable of rising up from our prejudices and discriminatory attitudes towards others, and that the gift of love knows no boundaries and can conquer all. The novel Maru is thus a statement against the prejudices of men, both white and black in Africa and the evils of racial discrimination. The story depicts love in the background of considerable angst and racial discrimination. Now let us move on to the work called Massacre River by Rene Philoctete. There is no mistaking the fact that the author has written this novel with the sole purpose of relating to us the sordid realities of the 1937 massacre of the Haitian immigrants in the Dominican Republic. The story is set in the Dominican town of Elias Pina, and moves to and from there to the border region between the Dominican Republic and Haiti. The central characters of the novel are the union activist and Dominican worker Pedro Brito and Adele, his young Haitian wife. The plot of Massacre River follows their story as it unfolds over the course of the Haitian massacre. It begins with the appearance of an ill-omen, a strange birdlike thing hovering in the sky over Elias Pina. “The beast is deaf. No one knows where it comes from” (Philoctete, 23) and continues through their frenzied attempts to re-unite in the face of the murderous chaos that stands between them. A major part of the work deals with the causes of the massacre, examining the roots of Dominican racial theory, the dreams of the Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo, and the carrying out of the massacre at the local level. One of the most frightening realties of this pitiful episode that the book recounts is the pronunciation of the Spanish noun ‘perejil’ or parsley in English, which was used to differentiate between the Dominican and Haitian residents of the border region. If you pronounced the word correctly, you lived- if you mispronounced it, you were hacked to death with a machete. It was as dastardly as that. This event draws parallels with the Rwandan massacre of 1994 when scores of Hutus were targeted and killed through radio messages (www.hrw.org). Though Rene Philoctete’s characters in Massacre River are numerous, yet many have the same feelings and emotions, which are unusual but explain the national sentiment. The madness of dictator Trujillo is evident, as even from a small child he was raised to believe that part of the territory along the Dominican-Haitian border correctly belonged to the Dominican Republic. He is aided by the really evil persona of Senor Perez Augustin de Cortoba, who is the Dominican boss of Elias Pina, and instigator and leader of the killings. Rene uses the language of magical realism so reminiscent of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Philoctete's use of language is compelling, as we would expect a poet’s to be. The intense images seem almost visible to the reader as we turn the pages, delivering a devastating and painful expression of the reality of the time, the place and the events that are taking place. The severed heads even talk to their bodies, and a talking truck discusses the character of the border people. In the hands of another author, this book would have been exceedingly grim considering its subject matter. What makes it outstanding is the incredible beauty of the author’s language and vision, and the tender portrayal of the love between Pedro and Adele, its central characters. Both are apolitical, yet so devoted to each other that if one disappeared, the other would “languish and die” (Philoctete, 37). Pedro thinks of his wife Adele: "She is this heat coursing through my body, this laughter throbbing in my blood." In the same manner, Adele describes herself "like pulp within [Pedro's] rind”. Pedro fears for his wife’s safety as Haitians begin to experience the “menace of Trujillo”. The human emotions are diverse, as the torture and massacre at the river is met by celebration and revelry in the Dominican capital. Yet Pedro thinks: "Adele is the sweat of my labor, my holiday, my resting place, my afternoon stroll ”(Philoctete, 88).Pedro comes home one day to find his wife’s throat slit. 17,000 Haitians died in the October 1937 massacre and it was poetic justice when Trujillo was assassinated in 1961. All in all, Massacre River is a deeply moral book as well, asking unanswered questions as it explores the roots of genocide in racism while at the same time extolling the beauty of a color-blind society of mixed nationalities that embraces all aspects of their roots. Its uniquely rich language and incredible characterization only serve to highlight the innate humaneness of Philoctete's abilities. It showcases the banality of torture and death and how the common people attempting to live their lives were constantly exposed to humiliation and death, never knowing exactly what would cause their tormentors to kill them. The contrast between the lush language and the depressing topic keeps the reader occupied, as they travel along the path of the story from start to finish. This book certainly evokes emotions as it proves the uselessness of racial discrimination and in fact, all types of prejudice. It also shows what a few mad men can do when power is concentrated and no one takes a stand to stop them. After murdering the innocent black Haitians, Trujillo put in their place 20,000 whites to whiten up the land- it was also found that he used powder profusely to whiten his own face. Adele’s death is not the end of hope but it serves to show the brutality of the human race in history’s darkest moments. The brutality of the entire episode turns the river red with blood and so it is named Massacre River by the author. Much the same feelings echo within The Farming of Bones by Edward Danticat. In his novel, the protagonist Amabelle Desir and her lover Sebastian Onies have crossed the border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic, unaware that Trujillo is about to unleash his reign of terror on the unsuspecting border people. Both have memories of deaths in the family, buried in their pasts, while they are unaware of what is coming. Nobody is ready for the machete wielding murder squads of Trujillo’s reckoning, or aware that their lives would hang in the balance, just dependent on the pronunciation of a single word- the equivalent of ‘parsely’ in the English language. The author notes that Haitians have never been able to carve an identity for themselves in their own homeland, rather political and economic strife have always pushed them out and away to other lands to work as servants and slaves under appalling conditions. Even the recent earthquake in Haiti is a stark reminder of this and that they need our sympathies and support and a lot of concerted effort by UN forces if lasting peace is to be achieved in that land. There are a lot of comparisons between Maru and Massacre River. Both deal with genocide, ethnic cleansing and racial discrimination. Both seek to lift the veils and find out the reason for this unrealistic hatred of one man for another- whether on the basis of religion, customs and traditions or historical legacy. There could be economic reasons as well, as one tribe or group dominated the landscape for quite some time and the other can’t even seem to gain a foothold to earn their livelihood. In the case of Maru, this was invariably the reason between the tussle among the two tribes-Bushmen and Botswanan. In the case of Massacre River, it is just an unreasonable hatred based on historical happenings of the past. All this however proves that sometimes racial hatred can have no logical basis- one can deem oneself superior to others just based on the color of their skin. Hitler’s quest for a new world order and Aryanism of the German race was certainly based on some exotic concepts- but in reality he just wanted to exterminate the Jewish race because he saw them live lives of luxury while his family had to slog to make ends meet. He could not bear the inequality. Another parallel that can be seen in both works is that both are set in a background of love mixed with death and destruction. There is considerable turmoil in both novels as events unfold. In both novels we see relationships torn apart- whether it is the result of childbirth that kills the child’s real mother to the separation of husband and wife due to different nationalities in Massacre River. Questions of race and identity similarly pervade both works. In Maru’s village, Bushmen and Botswanans are rivals. In Massacre River, Adele is Haitian while husband Pedro is Dominican. It does not matter that they are apolitical- circumstances dictate their fate. Though the older and younger Margaret stand up against the evils of racial discrimination and tribal hatred in a different manner, each posts a victory of sorts. The elder Margaret fights against the outer society while the younger Margaret strives to bring about a change in the village both from within and without. We are proud to see that she is successful on both counts. Conclusion Both the novels Maru and Massacre River deal with love amidst the evils of racial discrimination and hatred, but while the former is a figment of the imagination, the latter is very much an account of a true event in history. The truth is that black, yellow or white, we are still all God’s children. Works Cited Achebe, Chinua: Things Fall Apart. Anchor Books, 1994. Conrad, Joseph: Heart of Darkness. Tribeca Books, 2011. Head, Bessie: Maru (African Writer Series). Heinemann Educational Publishers,1995. Human Rights Watch: Leave None to Tell the Story: Genocide in Rwanda, 1999 (Updated in 2004). Accessed on 11 June 2011 at www.hrw.org. Mlaponi, Frederick: Colonialism in Africa. Accessed on 11 June 2011 at www.contentcaboodle.com. Philoctete, Rene & Coverdale, Linda (Trans.): Massacre River. New Direction Books, 2005. Read More