Post-colonial Literature in the American Context - Essay Example

Post Colonial Literature in the 'American Context' Introduction Post-colonial literature comes from Britain's former colonies in the Caribbean, Africa and India. Many post-colonial writers write in English and focus on common themes such as the struggle for independence, emigration, national identity, allegiance and childhood.(O'Reilly, 2001). Post-colonial theory deals with the reading and writing of literature written in previously or currently colonized countries, or literature written in colonizing countries which deals with colonization or colonized peoples. It focuses particularly on 1. the way in which literature by the colonizing culture distorts the experience and realities, and inscribes the inferiority, of the colonized people 2. on literature by colonized peoples which attempts to articulate their identity and reclaim their past in the face of that past's inevitable otherness. It can also deal with the way in which literature in colonizing countries appropriates the language, images, scenes, traditions and so forth of colonized countries. (Lye, 1998). This paper focus on the work of the two most talked about writers; Caryl Phillips of Crossing the River and John Maxwell Coetzee of Dusklands. Both writers has won several Nobel prize. Caryl Phillips was born on 13 March 1958 on the Caribbean island of St Kitts. He grew up in Leeds, England, and read English at Queen's College, Oxford. He is the author of six novels, several books of non-fiction and has written for film, theatre, radio and television. Much of his writing - both fiction and non-fiction - has focused on the legacy of the Atlantic slave trade and its consequences for the African Diaspora. John Maxwell Coetzee, 1940, South African novelist, b. John Michael Coetzee. Educated at the Univ. of Cape Town (M.A. 1963) and the Univ. of Texas (Ph.D. 1969), he taught in the United States and returned home (1983) to become a professor of English literature at Cape Town. He immigrated to Australia in 2002. Several of Coetzee's novels are noted for their eloquent protest against political and social conditions in South Africa, particularly the suffering caused by imperialism, apartheid, and postapartheid violence. His books are also known for their technical virtuosity. Caryl Phillips's Crossing the River Crossing the river has to do with black people fighting for their freedom. It has to do with slavery and the differences between black and white. That is what the book is about of course only the writer creates different situations in each separate story, which makes it more interesting to read, but it also shows the different aspects of 'crossing the river'. In the introduction to the story the so-called 'father' tells the reader about how he sold his three children: Nash, Martha and Travis. (A desperate foolishness. The crops failed. I sold my children.). This statement of the writer has a confusing meaning. Question would arise who is taking Why does someone do such a thing To others it is not acceptable but the explanation of the person delivering this statement can be understood as we go along with this literature. The first story is titled 'The Pagan Coast'. The story is about Nash. Nash Williams is a very loyal slave. His master is Edward Williams and he is a very generous master. Edward Williams, too, is guilt-ridden. At age 29, he inherits his father's estate, including 300 slaves. Concerned to still his conscience, Williams educates them and trains the best and brightest to become missionaries. He also displays an "excess of affection" for his young male slaves, especially to Nash Williams who calls Edward "Father," signing letters from Liberia, "Your son." (J. Griffin). He made it possible for all his slaves to get an education. There are some slaves who are complaining of for the unfair treatment to them by Williams. This is the reason that most slaves wanted to break free and 'cross the river' is that they were treated so terribly. With Nash it was different. He was treated very well, so you might expect that he does not feel the need to go away. He was sent to school and was treated by Williams as his own son. And he does not for a long time but finally he does decide to go. He throws away everything he has in America so he can go back to his roots and live very primitive. This shows that no matter how the slaves were treated, good or bad, they would rather live together with less luxury than live apart with more luxury. So this can conclude that they feel very close to people of there own kind. Why else would he go back to his original country, where he have never been and don't know anybody, if he has a good life somewhere else, where he do know people. This shows how very strong their cultural feelings were. In the second part of the book is totally different from the first story. The part is titled 'West'. This story is about Martha. Martha did really 'cross the river', more than once even. She is an example of a woman that had to fight for freedom and had to suffer the consequences of slavery. She was once a slave with a husband slave and a baby slave, until they were all sold and separated. When Martha's second master tells her that she will have to be sold again, she decides to escape. That's when she has to 'cross the river' and she heads west. She ends up in a little town where she is lucky enough to find a man that will help her out. The difference between Martha and Nash is that Martha has to keep working to stay alive. Because of the simple fact that if she doesn't succeed on her own she will have to go back and work as a slave. That is also why she keeps on moving. Another reason for her strong will, that makes her fight so hard, is that little bit of hope in the back of her mind that one day she might see her daughter again. A lot of slaves back then probably always kept dreaming of one day maybe being reunited with their children. That is something that really kept them going. Martha has been through a lot more than Nash has and that this is definitely a different kind of 'crossing the river. Through her-story, the author shows the permanent psychological and spiritual damage caused by the breaking up and scattering of her family. Under the system of slavery, the nourishing nucleus of the family was the only space where slaves could find some alleviation from the dehumanization they were subjected to. This institution, nevertheless, was constantly menaced by the selling, hiring and killing of its members. Martha's story is rich, nuanced and unfamiliar. She is an elderly black woman, tired, not strong or invincible: victimized but not victim. Both blacks and whites abandon her. And, she is not religious: "Martha could find no solace in religion, and was unable to sympathize with the sufferings of the son of God when set against her own private misery." Her question, "Father, why hast thou forsaken me" is not a momentary lapse but an emblem of her crisis of faith. Moreover, her story takes place in an unfamiliar territory, the west. Few African American writers have mapped the terrain of those black pioneers who trekked west in search of "a place where things were a little better than bad, and where you weren't always looking over your shoulder and wondering when somebody was going to do you wrong." Although Martha's body moves in a freer space, that tired, broken body cannot take advantage of this freedom, and its mind remains enslaved by memory. Through Martha we learn the subtle differences between slavery and freedom: life doesn't get easier, one just has the right to claim a momentary happiness. "I was free now, but it was difficult to tell what difference being free was making in my life. I was just doing the same things like before, only I was more contented, not on account of no emancipation proclamation, but on account of my Chester." This freedom is a tenuous thing. When white men kill her independent black lover, the man who "has made her happy . . . made her forget -- and that's a gift from above," Martha wonders "if love was possible without somebody taking it from her." A daughter of the despondent African father, Martha dies alone, anonymous, on the far bank of the river. The final section of the novel brings the progeny of slave and enslaver together in an act of passion and love. Travis is an American GI stationed "somewhere in England." His beloved Joyce is a married, white, working-class, English woman. Joyce's sensitive, if cynical, voice dominates her tale. Speaking of Churchill and the war, she says, "I was getting good at learning the difference between the official stories and the evidence before my eyes." She is able, in particular, to see through an American officer's warnings about the black GIs stationed in her town, and she falls in love with Travis. Her defiance and independence allow her to be open to Travis, while distancing her from her provincial and abusive mother and husband. The clear-eyed, unsentimental Joyce speaks one of the major truths of the novel. Looking at her coffee-colored son, Greer, she thinks, "I almost said make yourself at home, but I didn't. At least I avoided that." Through her love for Travis and the child they share, Joyce joins the Diaspora, and she pays a price for this alliance. In loving Travis, she boldly resists the color line, but she is forced to give up their child -- yet another brown baby given away by a loving but desperate parent. Caryl Phillips gives us a world of abandoned souls, of resistance, and of desperate, momentary love -- the world of the African Diaspora and the new culture that is born from it. In the book's final pages, surely among the most powerful and beautiful pages written in contemporary literature, we hear this culture's own song. Phillips's culture of diaspora is not romanticized, rooted in a mythological African past, and the culminating chorus is correspondingly inharmonious. It sounds the voices of all the novel's characters, including that prophetic anonymous narrator who, having initiated the chorus, maps the contours of the African Diaspora in its complex, multicolored pathos and its human beauty. Dusklands by J.M. Coetzee Dusklands is made up of two novellas, "The Vietnam Project" and "The Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee," which present forceful indictments of the brutal inhumanity that marked two historical events: the American bombing of Vietnam and Cambodia in the 1960s and early 1970s and the journeys into the interior of South Africa by white hunter-adventurers in the eighteenth century. J. M. Coetzee's Dusklands, published in 1974 in South Africa, is actually not a novel but rather two short novellas that share a common theme. That theme is an exploration of power, or the lack of it, depending on whose side you are on. It is about the power to rule that is fought for in war, or the power that is exerted in prejudice against a group of people who are considered less than human. It is about the power of the mind to conceptualize how to demean a nation of people; how to propagandize one's beliefs; or how to rationalize one's horrible and disgraceful actions. And it is about the power of survival. But power is not the only theme. Dusklands is not only about the power of extensive military machines or the dominance exhibited by white supremacy or the exploitation of colonization. It is also about the sometimes deadly consequences of culture clash, the disintegration of the human spirit, and the complete destruction of a way of life. In the first novella, Eugene Dawn, assigned to produce a report on the potential of broadcast propaganda in the war with the Vietcong, ends instead by dismissing propaganda as a military strategy and passionately urging a massive chemical attack on the earth of the enemy country itself. The crazed note struck at the conclusion of the report is continued into the growing insanity of actions that follow its completion, as Dawn decamps with, and then injures, his young son, and is finally institutionalized. On the first page of "The Vietnam Project" we become aware that a textual game is being played, for we learn that the narrator's supervisor is called Coetzee, and by the end of the novella the first-person present-tense narrative has become an impossibility, telling as it does of events that could not by any stretch of the imagination coincide with the recording of them. As if this were not enough, our attention is drawn to this impossibility in a classic met fictional comment by the putative narrator: "A convention," he suddenly tells us while describing the moments just before he stabs his son, "allows me to record these details". The second novella in the Dusklands is the "The Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee,". Jacobus Coetzee, from the start of his "narrative" in the second novella, exhibits the prejudices of the eighteenth-century Dutch frontier-dweller in South Africa, prejudices that allow him to treat the native inhabitants of the country as an inferior, and if necessary expendable, species. These attitudes are most graphically manifested when, having been deserted by several of his servants on his elephant-hunting expedition to the territory of the Great Namaquas, he makes a return visit to punish them with the utmost savagery. Reading on to "The Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee," we find a text that is at once both more thoroughgoing in its documentary trappings and more subversive of them, in, for instance, the glaring inconsistencies among the three accounts of Jacobus's expeditions:the main "Narrative," the "Afterword" (supposedly by the translator's father, S. J. Coetzee), and the "Deposition" (presented as Jacobus's recorded statement). Another example of the undermining of documentary verisimilitude is the unlikely philosophical speculation of the frontiersman, including--to give just one example of the challenges to realism--an unacknowledged and anachronistic citation from William Blake. Although both novellas contain passages of characteristic Coetzean intensity, it is the second that carries the greater weight and presages more fully the achievements to come. One of its central concerns is a specific version of the self-other nexus that was to be developed further in several later works: the relationship between master and servant. The representation of Jacobus's relations with his Hottentot (Khoi) servants, and particularly with the foreman on his farm, Jan Klawer, is the first of many treatments in Coetzee's fiction of the master-servant dynamic. Klawer is an "old-time Hottentot" , one of "the breed, now dying, of the old farm Hottentot" --it always seems to be the case that the current generation of servants is inferior to the previous one--and not once but twice called "good, faithful old Jan Klawer". Level-headed under pressure, willing to fight for justice, yet capable of regularly performing the most intimate of services for his master (supporting him while he empties his bowels into a gourd , cleaning the pus from his anal boil, he seems the model servant. Even his peccadilloes are conventional, and treated in a conventional way: Jacobus finds him one morning asleep, after a night of revelry, with a fat Namaqua woman, and instead of punishing him for failing to bring breakfast, merely teases him, with man-to-man sexual raillery. When Jacobus waxes philosophical to Klawer the servant excuses himself for not understanding: "He was only a poor hotnot,' he said" Klawer remains loyal when the other servants desert Jacobus, and the two of them set off on the arduous journey home. Reaching the river which Jacobus has named the Great River (later to become the Orange River) they tie themselves together and attempt a crossing. Klawer accidentally steps into a hippopotamus hole and is swept into deep water: With horror he watched his faithful servant and companion drawn struggling downstream, shouting broken pleas for help which he was powerless to tender him, him whose voice was had never in all my days heard raised, until he disappeared from sight around a bend and went to his death bearing the blanket roll and all the food. We may recognize as we read this sentence yet another instance of the familiar discourse of the trusty servant, and as at many other points in the novella (and in the report within "The Vietnam Project"), parody seems on the verge of losing its critical edge and giving way to something more like pastiche (a shift Coetzee avoids in his later novels). What is hard not to experience as parodic, however, is the rapidity with which Klawer is dispatched, a rapidity which the formulaic bids for pathos fail to mitigate. "Companion," after all, is part of the self-deceiving rhetoric of mastery, and the parenthetical comment about Klawer's voice a further sentimentalization of an exploitative relationship. And highly comic parody certainly reasserts itself at the end of the sentence, when the natural climax on "went to his death" is succeeded by a further clause registering what appears to be of greater concern to the narrator, the loss of the bedroll and the food. But whatever the hints of authorial mockery at Jacobus's self-deceiving rhetoric, the narrative unfurls smoothly enough, and we willingly go along with the rehearsal of events, perhaps barely aware of the highly conventional nature of the language. The crossing took all of an hour, for they had to probe the bottom before each step for fear of slipping into a hippopotamus hole and being swept off their feet. But sodden and shivering us finally reached the south bank and lit a discreet fire to dry our clothes and blankets. The shock of this negation of what we have just read is all the greater for the lack of any preparation or of any stylistic signal that something strange is happening to the narrative. The style remains resolutely normal, yet every word seems wrong. We cannot read these sentences in the way we have been reading up to now--sharing the thoughts and feelings of a recognizable human being, letting ourselves be impelled onward by the successive events of the story--but have to read them as sentences in a crafted fiction, sentences constructed by selecting from the treasury of conventional phrases associated with the adventure tale. (Only the "hippopotamus hole" is startlingly precise.) We may try to naturalize the contradiction--hallucination on the part of Jacobus Coetzee imperfect revision on the part of S. J. Coetzee malicious mistranslation on the part of the fictional J. M. Coetzee--but it remains a powerful disturbance in the hitherto relatively smooth operation of the reality effect, a breach of the contract between author and reader from which we may not, as readers of Dusklands and perhaps as readers of Coetzee, recover. From the vantage point of this paragraph, the familiar discourse of the servant by means of which we have come to know Klawer is exposed, in retrospect, in all its conventionality: Jacobus's claims to know his servant through and through are revealed as worse than false, since the very terms in which such claims are made are barriers to knowledge. We read on, more alert than we have been, perhaps, to the multiple and simultaneous threads of the work--the mimetic tracing of the mental processes of an eighteenth-century colonial adventurer, the displacements of that mimesis by anachronisms and parodies, the successive stages in the narrative of discovery, survival, and revenge, the tonal and stylistic surprises. What follows is a different death for Klawer, this time from illness, and again the clichs come thick and fast. Here is a selection: If he had believed in me, or indeed in anything, he would have recovered. But he had the constitution of a slave, resilient under the everyday blows of life, frail under disaster. (94) "Klawer, old friend," I said, "things are going badly with you. But never fear, I will not desert you." "No, master," said Klawer, "I cannot do it, you must leave me." A noble moment, worthy of record. "Goodbye, master," he said, and wept. My eyes were wet too. I trudged off. He waved. Having promised to come back within a week by horse, Jacobus leaves. He is soon exulting almost insanely in his solitude, his freedom from "watching eyes and listening ears" . There is no further mention of his promise to Klawer, and few readers can be surprised: the final dialogue between master and servant sounds, as we say, as if it came out of a book. Reference 1. Farah Jasmine Griffin "Crossing the River by Caryl Phillips," Boston Review 2005 2. African Diaspora, http://www.coloradocollege.edu 3. William D. Pierson. Black Yankees(Boston, 1988) 4. Post-colonial Literature by Christopher O'Reilly, CUP, 2001 5. Some Issues in Postcolonial Theory , John Lye, 1998 6. Rosemary jolly, the gun as copula;coloniastion , rape, and the question of pornographic violence in jm coetzees dusklands, world literature written in english 32-33, no.2-1 (1992-1993) p44-55 7. Gail Low, 'a Chorus of Common Memory: slavery and redemption in CPS crossing the river, Cambridge, research in african literature 29,4 (1998) 122-139 8. British Council Arts, contemporary writers, http://www.contemporarywriters.com/authors/p=auth80 9. http://www.english.emory.edu/Bahri/Coetzee.html Read More