Colonialism and Postcolonialism in Caribbean Literature: A Reading of Rhys the Wide Sargasso - Research Paper Example

1. Executive summary The purpose of this paper is to interpret and analyse literary texts and theory in the light of postcolonial approaches. It would help us acquire knowledge about the prehistory and history of the postcolonial theory and discuss major texts (Rhys’ The Wide Sargasso Sea, and Naipaul’s The Mimic Men) that comprise both these movements. It would also let us distinguish between the different schools of thoughts of post colonial theory and make us able to critique how post colonial theory draws from and reacts to the major western developments in the theory. We would see that how these theories are applied to the interpretation of these literary texts in the Caribbean and most of all the effect of the colonial experience to hybrid writers like Naipaul and Rhys. Towards, the end of the paper, we hope to achieve a clear understanding of how the Caribbean theory and literature relate to the issues in post-colonial theory. 2. Introduction It is only towards the mid-half of the twentieth century that a valuable and noteworthy group of literature body began to emerge from the Caribbean and it is this group who had to face the huge task of demystifying the colonial myth and pessimism of the Caribbean people and place. It is they who dared to make a breakthrough amidst the attack of both Black and White criticism. While being born from the legend to gossip of the “sailors, saltfish merchants, displaced criminals, yellow fever victims, slaves in the cane fields, Maroons in the bush”: “the men and women who laid the foundations of the Caribbean societies in the Sixteenth and the Seventeenth centuries” (Dance, I), the Caribbean literature was looked down upon by the high flying literature laureates. But almost after 50 years of its emergence, it started producing some fantastic authors who had much more to tell than about mere landscapes, nature and common people. Writers like VS Naipaul even went on to achieve noble prize for his rich contribution in the field of literature. 2.1 Post Colonial Theory Post-colonial theory deals with the reading and writing of literature written in either pre or presently colonized nations, or literature born in colonizing nations which focuses on colonized people or colonization. It throws light particularly on 1. How the literature by the colonizing culture alters the realities and experiences, and engraves the low standard of the colonized people. 2. The literature by colonized folks which endeavors to elucidate their identity and salvage their past despite its inevitable apartness. It at times also portrays the way in which literature in colonizing countries fits the language, culture, customs, traditions, scenes, visions and etc. of colonized countries. Postcolonial theory is largely based on the concept of otherness. However, there are unresolved issues related to the concept of otherness, for example: 1. Otherness may also mean duplicity, both in terms of individuality and difference, meaning thereby that each other , every dissimilar than and eliminated by, is dialectically crafted and comprises the values and significance of the colonizing culture even though its power to define has been denied; 2. Abdul Jan Mohamed debates that the western concept of the oriental is based on the Manichean allegory (viewing the world as bifurcated into mutually excluding opposites): “if the west is ordered, rational, masculine, good, then the orient is chaotic, irrational, feminine, and evil. Simply to reverse this polarizing is to be complicit in its totalizing and identity-destroying power (all is reduced to a set of dichotomies, black or white, etc.);” 3. Coming from a multitude of cultures and having varied traditions, the colonized people are versatile in their nature and in their customs, and as personalities in cultures, they are both made and transforming, so in that case they might be 'other' from the colonizers, they also differ from one another and from their own history, and should not be essentialized or summed up -- through likewise perceptions as Indian soul, aboriginal culture, a black consciousness etc. This summing up and essentialization is mostly a kind of reminiscence, which is more or less inspired by the thinking of the colonizers than that of the colonized. As John Frow remarks, it is a making of a mythical One out of many... It might provide the colonizer a sense of oneness of his culture whilst perplexing that of others. 4. The colonized shall even vary from the other in their pasts, which may be retrieved but never rebuilt, and thus must be revisited and comprehended in bits and pieces. Postcolonial theory is also based on the concept of resistance. Resistance here means rebellion or antagonism or impersonation but with the disturbing problem that the resisted are always engraved by resistance in to quality of resisting. Apart from it, the concept of resistance brings about with it ideas about identity, individuality, human freedom, liberty etc. These ideas may not be looked upon in a similar fashion in the colonized culture's outlook of mankind. On the plain socio-political level there are issues with the fact that to give birth to a literature which is targeted to rebuild the identity of the colonized people, one may get the least advantage of the production system of the colonizers - book writing, publishing, advertising and production, for example. These may demand a federal economic and cultural structure which is finally either imported from the West or a hybrid figure, converging local conceptions with that of the west. The concept of producing a national or cultural literature is mostly a foreign concept to the traditions of the colonized people, who (a) Had absolutely no literary background and it was envisioned in the western traditions or in fact no writing history at all, and/or (b) did not view art with the same function of constructing and defining cultural identity, and/or (c) Were, like the West Indians, shifted into a completely different geographical/economic/cultural/political world. (India, to some extent was an exception as it had a long-founded tradition of letters; apart from it, it was a greatly balkanized sub-continent with a very little common identity and diverge sub-cultures). It is always a changed, a cultivated but hybrid identity, which is constituted or called out by the colonizeds' efforts to build and signify identity. It is however difficult to understand or pass on the concept of identity and nationality in the cultural customs of the colonized people. At the same time, it is also difficult to comprehend that how a colonized nation can retrieve or rebuild its identity in a language and genre it has presently adopted but are not originally its own. As a consequence, the literature there has the chance of being written in the colloquial style of the locals of a specific colonized section, which may not read like what is called Standard English. In case of such literature the standard literary notions and general metaphors and signs may be out of place or may be substituted by tropes and references which are unfamiliar to British culture and usage. In such cases, it becomes tough for others to identify or value the work as literature. There are other occasions, when the breach of the artistic norms of the Western literature is unavoidable: 1. When the colonized authors look forward to run into their culture's prehistoric yet altered heritage, and 2. As they try to deal with social problems and solutions in such a manner that the obvious artistic transformations of so called high western literature do not hold any more importance. For someone who has grown up with strong aesthetic ideals, it is difficult to digest the fact that great literature may be inappropriate and mislaid at some point in a culture's history, and thus may not be a good literature at all for a particular cultural usage. The development and growth of literature in a colonized nation has a strong chance of becoming hybrid because of the reclaimed cultures. Thereby, their literature may appear disparate, uneven and might even challenge those ideas of common sense and order which may be standard not only to western mindset but also to literary forms and traditions fashioned all the way through western concept. The term 'hybrid' mentioned above comes from the concept of hybridity, a very important concept in the post-colonial theory, that refers to the integration (or, mixing) of cultural symbols and practices from the colonizing and the colonized cultures ("integration" may be too orderly a word to represent the variety of stratagems, desperate or cunning or good-willed, by which people adapt themselves to the necessities and the opportunities of more or less oppressive or invasive cultural impositions, live into alien cultural patterns through their own structures of understanding, thus producing something familiar but new). The amalgamation and adjustment of cultural applications and the cross-breeding of cultures can be viewed as dynamic, positive and inspirational and at the same time repressive. The concept of "Hybridity" also helps to break down the phony sense that the colonizing or colonized cultures for that issue- are colossal, or have indispensable and fixed features. The depiction of these irregular and most of the time hybrid, multivalent and multilingual cultural sites (retrieved or revealed colonized cultures looking for identity and significance in an intricate and yet partially strange past) may not appear like the demonstrations of bourgeois culture in western art. This so called western art is ideologically fashioned in a manner to illustrate its own truths. Homi Bhabha wrote on the intricate issue of representation and meaning in his article in Greenblatt and Gun's Redrawing the Boundaries: Culture as a strategy of survival is both transnational and translational. It is transnational because contemporary postcolonial discourses are rooted in specific histories of cultural displacement, whether they are the middle passage of slaver and indenture, the voyage out of the civilizing mission, the fraught accommodation of Third World migration to the West after the Second World War, or the traffic of economic and political refugees within and outside the Third World. Culture is translational because such spatial histories of displacement -- now accompanied by the territorial ambitions of global media technologies -- make the question of how culture signifies, or what is signified by culture, a rather complex issue. It becomes crucial to distinguish between the semblance and similitude of the symbols across diverse cultural experiences -- literature, art, music, ritual, life, death -- and the social specificity of each of these productions of meaning as they circulate as signs within specific contextual locations and social systems of value. The transnational dimension of cultural transformation -- migration, diaspora, displacement, relocation -- makes the process of cultural translation a complex form of signification. The natural(ized), unifying discourse of nation , peoples , or authentic folk tradition, those embedded myths of cultures particularity, cannot be readily referenced. The great, though unsettling, advantage of this position is that it makes you increasingly aware of the construction of culture and the invention of tradition. 3. Analysis of the works in hand Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea and V.S. Naipaul’s The Mimic Men are examples of writers/works mired in the politics and discourse of colonialism which they imply to attack, or who skilfully challenge such a discourse to "produce bodies of literature strong in quality, diverse in perspective, and rich in content and style" (Sodial F.H. Deena 2001). The success and plausibility of this type of broad approach lies upon various factors like: 1. the fine distinction and analysis of the series of issues dealing with the politics of "postcolonialism" as a theoretical, political or historical subject 2. the scrutiny of the inferences to the instant purpose at hand 3. the strategy engaged for connecting the former to the latter 4. the relative importance allocated to the critique of postcolonialism as it applies to writers and their works Keeping the above factors in mind, this paper will discuss Rhys’s and Naipaul’s works in hand and examine how the colonial machineries act as instruments of disorder and mimicry in Naipaul's The Mimic Men and how Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea may be observed in light of the economic exploitation of Antoinette, the protagonist. Both the protagonists, Antoinette (Wide Sargasso Sea) and Ralph Singh (The Mimic Men), though have serious identity issues in common; they stand as separate distinct characters. We shall deal with major issues tackled in these two books. 3.1 The Importance of the Island The setting plays a major role in the construction of any plot. In the case of these two books, too, the two islands, Coulibri (Wide Sargasso Sea) and Isabella (The Mimic Men) are the driving force behind the mental make-up of the protagonists and have much to do with how their distinct personalities shape up gradually. Both Antoinette and Ralph suffer from identity crisis because of their native connection with these islands, though in a completely different manner. Antoinette, the protagonist in Rhys’s book is deeply attached to the Caribbean land, especially Coulibri and Dominica but she is uprooted from both these places because of the chauvinistic and colonial interference of Mason and Rochestor. This could be very well explained in the cultural and political context of the Caribbean which was ruled by the metropolitan countries. The plight of the land is similar to Antoinette’s condition. Since she loses her sense of belonging to the Caribbean landscapes, she suffers from a misplaced and destructed identity. The marriage of Annette with Mason is undoubtedly, vital to the plot of riot at Coulibri, the parallel of Eden (19), and this riot impels the family out of their fallen paradise. “Jagged Stone” from Tia curbs Antoinette’s efforts to remain in Coulibri. She was so much attached to this place that she wants to hold to it tight. She says, “As I ran, I thought, I will live with Tia and I will be like her. Not to leave Coulibri. Not to Go. Not. (45) Much later in a rather introspective mood, she tells Rochester about how deep her love for Coulibri and Dominica was. Whereas, the displaced account of Ralph Singh in The Mimic Men pans through the imaginary Caribbean island Isabella--a British colonial custody amid nationalization, which is inspired by many Caribbean states but is basically modelled on Trinidad and England. Isabella has a past of slavery which has marked the island with a 'taint' Ralph strongly desires to break away from while the effect of his personal East Indian immigrant history, in which he "is the late intruder, the picturesque sciatic, linked to neither" [master nor slave] (78), provides to absolute a “little bastard world" (122). As a consequence, the natives of Isabella create “a haphazard, disordered and mixed society" (55). The projection of Isabella is based on the history of Trinidad, which substantiates that the East Indian community suffered exceptional unfairness due to their initial financial condition as bonded labours for decades and to their yearning to stick to their customs and religion. Ralph calls his success a gift that is tainted, that "sets us apart, it distorts us" (61) and the name of the land development, Kripalville, is "corrupted to Crippleville" (59). Unlike Rhys’s Antoinette, who is deeply attached to her island, Naipaul’s Ralph is rather ashamed of his island. Ralph, his wife, and the social system they relate with are also class apart from the remaining Isabellan society. The class to which Ralph belongs to, has "all studied abroad and married abroad;" It was "a group to whom the island was a setting" and for them "the past had been cut away" (55). They symbolize what Frantz Fanon labels an ‘underdeveloped middle class,’ the product of an anaemic colonial economy which is insufficient to support an essential middle class employed in manufacture as captains or financiers of industry but instead involved in mediator activities such as small-scale agriculture, business and the professions (149-50). Ralph Singh's concerns and those of his social position typify "the profoundly cosmopolitan mould" (Fanon, 149) of this class's mind-set for whom the ‘restriction’ of island life is an invariable contradiction. Generally, Colonial and Postcolonial writers have presented their land and surroundings with utmost reverence, devotion and have also used tools of personification to make their work appear intimate to the readers. Apart from this, it also creates a rather complex yet fascinating montage relationship between the land and its people. The setting lies in perfect harmony with the characters and it even manages to stir the readers emotionally. Mostly it is seen that the colonizers misuse and abuse the land and its people to the hilt through their social, political and financial power. While on the other hand, the colonized continue to respect their land and celebrate its energy and beauty and even go on to derive strength from the hardships. This theory can be implied to Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea but such is not the case with Naipaul’s The Mimic Men. This could be well explained by these lines quoted in The Mimic Men: "We, here on our island, handling books printed in this world, and sing its goods, had been abandoned and forgotten. We pretended to be real, to be learning, to be preparing ourselves for life, we mimic men of the New world, one unknown corner of it, with all its reminders of the corruption that came so quickly to the new." (146) The corruption Ralph observes in the past and the society it generates, and his consequential sense of estrangement from both, pervades Ralph's experience of all facet of community life in Isabella, particularly politics. 3.2 The Otherness of the Self The protagonists of these books suffer from serious identity crisis and deal with the problem in their own distinct way. Antoinette, the protagonist in Rhys’s book is desperate in her attempts to escape from the negation and depression of her life and she is almost frantic in her efforts to carve an individual identity of her own. She is tormented by the parrot’s questions- “Who’s there?”, “Who are you?” and struggles every bit to find the answers. But alas, destiny has something else planned for her. The domineering patriarchal society she lives in comes forward to crush her. Initially, Antoinette is in harmony with the Caribbean land and its surroundings. She is love with the greenery, streaming water and the sunny atmosphere. She draws the jest of life from this colourful environment and is enthused by the deep rose colours, like green, purple and blue. She even writes her name in “fiery red” (53). On the other hand, Rochester is deeply hurt and broken. For him even the colours are too much. He finds this environment overpowering and controlling. He fails to dominate or rule the intoxicating landscape and at the same time it also showcases his inability to celebrate the colourful and passionate nature of his wife. He even fails to compete to her vibrant sexuality. Threatened and afraid of the surroundings, Rochester, “broke a spray off and trampled it into the mud”. (99). His attempt to crush the landscape is symbolic of the way he destroys Antoinette’s life in order to control her. The reason he is unable to satiate his greedy lust is because his colonial outlook links his hatred to Antoinette and her land. “Above all I hated her for she belonged to the magic and the loveliness. She had left me thirsty... (147) Carole Angier (1985) explains the implications of Rochester’s destruction as she argues that, “in destroying this place for Antoinette, Rochester precipitates her madness because he has destroyed her sense of hope, of belonging, of ownership, autonomy and ultimately her own sense of personal power.” (154) In fact the vicissitude of his destruction is so strong that it compels Antoinette to confess to Rochester: “I hate it now like I hate you and before I die I will show you how much I hate you. (47) Take note that the story of Wide Sargasso Sea is set just after the freedom of the slaves and during this difficult time the racial relations were in their most strained form in the Caribbean. Antoinette hails from the plantation possessors and her father has had many illegitimate relationships with Negro women and even fathered their children. Her situation is pathetic as she neither can be acknowledged by the Negro community nor by the members of the colonial hub. She is a non-entity as a white Creole. The stain of racial adulteration combined with the inkling that her mental discrepancy fetches about her unavoidable downfall. Here, a similarity can be drawn with Naipaul’s Ralph Singh in The Mimic Men. Ralph is alienated from Isabella, his birth place and immediate foundation of history and culture. At the same time he is not accepted whole heartedly by England, the country, history, and culture with which he desires to identify. In a denial of more positivist postcolonial theory, Ralph succumbs to explore areas of growth in gaps of interstices between these cultures and identities. It is worth noting that Colonialism confines Ralph's identity and future to two roles: the mimic man or the colonized man. In any case, in Ralph's perceptive, he has the choice of romanticizing the colonial culture and, thus, trying to develop in to colonial man or adopting the racialized, colonized pose of “aboriginal savage.” Undoubtedly, Ralph’s colonial education has instigated him to aspire to the centre. Ralph notes, "At Isabella Imperial we were natural impersonators" (144). This initial imitation training pushes an adult Ralph to envision himself, "not as an individual but as a performer, in that child's game where every action of the victim is deemed to have been done at the command of this tormentor" (85). In such pessimistic conditions, Ralph constructs this analogy between his drafted identities, which is the effect of a wish to assimilate. Crossing the line of impersonation, Ralph even goes to regret the current decolonized and depoliticized era, in comparison to his colonial fantasy, in which he is the master, who supervises the depoliticized, black labors (34-35). Thus, we can clearly derive that Ralph lets himself to live in the fantasy of being markedly defined apart from the oppressed and long suffering sect, the black majority. Ralph's incentive for impersonation also comes from wariness for the recognized lack of Isabellan history and culture. He mockingly comments: To be descended from generations To be descended from generations of idlers and failures, an unbroken line of the unimaginative, unenterprising and oppressed, had always seemed to me to be a cause for deep, silent shame. (89) Living in ignorance, Ralph detaches himself from his own legacy and denies any counter opinion, by pretending the colonialist's justification for colonialism. By regularly identifying himself as closer to Britain than Isabella, Ralph self-creates problems of integration to one culture, which he wishes to wipe out, and another that will snub him. According to Halloran, Thomas F (2007), “Although the problem of racial identity is articulated, Ralph fails to escape this double bind by continuing to act in relation to the other's expectations of his nationality and race. Comparatively, Ralph is entering into a much older debate that begins with Plato's allegory of the cave. The primitive identity is ignorant of questions of identity before colonization which seeks to shape the colonized. The backlash to colonization is nationalism which asserts an invented pre-colonial identity that did not exist prior to the colonizer's arrival. Ralph has arrived at this critical crossroads of identity, but is failing to forge an independent creation, as he is aware of the ignorance of not doing so, but likewise is in rapture of British power and authority.” In fact, Ralph concludes that the sole thing his group fabricates is drama which has no permanent effect on actual conditions (214). Memmi (1965) is of the same opinion that the colonized society "is a diseased society in which internal dynamics no longer succeed in creating new structures" (98-9) but Ralph never considers a proposal like Fanon's that "underdeveloped countries ought to do their utmost find their own particular values and methods and a style which shall be peculiar to them" ( 99). Thus, it is fascinating that while Ralph so clearly sees the problems facing those who wish to change the economic and political conditions in Isabella, he rather throws spotlight on the pathetic condition of their plight instead on the British responsibilities and rationalizations for creating and retaining the colonial situation. Despite the lack of "a prescription for undertaking the transition from direct force to a period after decolonization when a new political order achieves moral hegemony, is part of the difficulty we live with today" (Said, "Yeats and Decolonization," 91), as far as people suffer and these historical conditions have adverse effects on their lives, one should not announce the war over as not all can make a final escape to London as Ralph does. 4. Conclusion As postcolonial theory keeps evolving with critics manoeuvring the discourse into previous theories of Marxism, Feminism, and Structuralism, the readers should be conscious of the drawbacks of such course-plotting lest they become included into those constricted non-overlapping discussions of theory. If interpreted in its complete prospective, postcolonial theory fits elements of the earlier spins in critical theory, the reason being that postcolonial theory is a mere accumulation of past approaches adjoined. The Mimic Men urges critics to think that the Third World is not utterly Third World, not devoured wholly in politics or problems of identity; of course these issues are there as well. This is well explained by Edward Said in his book Representations of the Intellectual, in his talk titled "Intellectual Exile: Expatriates and Marginal’s," Said explains the secular writer's universal dilemma of continual evolution and an ongoing intervention of challenging loyalties: “The exile therefore exists in a median state, neither completely at one with the new setting not fully disencumbered of the old, beset with half-involvements and half-detachments, nostalgic and sentimental on one level, an adept mimic or a secret outcast on another”. (49) To make things further clear, it is important to refer to Jameson's essay, Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism, although short-sighted, is one of the most vital essays in the postcolonial critical principle. Jameson differentiates Third World literature as proportional to the West, as the Third World is formed by financial and political pressure. For Him, this general struggle gives birth to a postcolonial style of writing which interrelates with global and thus political issues. Jameson further makes use of this classification of Third World Literature to produce a standard, in which the significant characteristic goes past location and history to incorporate political and structure resonance. Thus, we can relate the points made by these critics with Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea and Naipaul’s The Mimic Men. Jean Rhys and V. S. Naipaul play a dominant role in the postcolonial writings. They have an urge to articulate their fluid, hybrid and unstable identities in terms of their distinctive postcolonial cultural perspectives. 5. References 1. Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-colonial Literatures. New York: Routledge, 1989. 2. Bhabha, Homi. “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse.” The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge, 1994. 85-92. 3. Carter, E., J. Donald, and J. Squires, eds. Space and Power: Theories of Identity and Location. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1993. 4. Carole Angier, Jean Rhys (Penguin Books, 1985) 121 5. Deena Seodial, Literature of Nature. Patrick D. Murphy, Terry Gifford, Katsunori. 1998 - Literary Criticism - 490 6. Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1963 7. Jan Mohammed, Abdul R., and D. Lloyd, eds. The Nature and Context of Minority Discourse. New York: Oxford UP, 1990. 8. Jameson, Fredric. "Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism." Social Text 15 (1986): 65-88. 9. Lye, John. “Some Issues in Postcolonial Theory” 1997-98 10. Memmi, Albert. The Colonizer and the Colonized New York: The Orion Press, 1965. 11. Naipaul, V.S. The Mimic Men. London: Picador, 2002. 12. Rhys, Jean. Wide Sargasso Sea. New York: Norton, 1966; London, Andre Duetsch, 1966. 13. Said, Edward. Representations of the Intellectual. New York: Vintage Books, 1996. "Yeats and Decolonization," pp. 69-95. Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990. Read More